Chill On Ice Lounge
Editorial
INo, it’s not a trip to Disneyland inside a meat locker, Ice Lounge is part of a frosty franchise of about 20 bars around the world. Melbourne’s was carved out about a few years ago by a pair of entrepreneurs who were inspired by Sweden’s Ice Hotel, via the Bond movie. Ice Lounge is in the CBD where it’s sometimes ‘freezing’ but never down to the requisite minus 10 degrees needed to keep an ice bar intact, so that means a lot of refrigeration. It costs $30 per person for 30 minutes and, using my vast skills of arithmetic, that makes it $1 per minute. It’s not all that cheap but it covers the electricity bill at least.
Ice Lounge has proven popular with tourists and corporate crowds, and what with the financial markets continually freezing up, someone has to party on ice. After you pay, you’re shown a dressing area where you can put on a ski jacket, hat and gloves, all of which you’ll need when you step inside the 30 tonnes of carved ice that makes up the small bar inside. There are little animal furs on the big carved ice block seats (for non-vegan backsides only), some large ice sculptures (which I don’t have space to critique here, luckily) and some LCD screens showing films about Antarctica…brrrr, but penguins…cute! The bar’s lighting system glows up inside the ice, making the space glow like a ‘70s disco. It gives you a great impression of what it must feel like to be an ice cube in a nightclub. Speaking of, the drinks are also served in (you guessed it) glass-shaped icecups, so there’s no washing up, perfect, just don’t hold it to your lips too long or it sticks. It’s a bad look being unable to remove your mouth from your drink (or an ice sculpture), don’t you know?
Apparently you can only stay in there comfortably for half an hour, and you are reminded of this by a little alarm they hang around your neck. You’ll quickly want more than the one complimentary vodka, as one apparently equates to three drinks in the cold, there are thankfully a few other simple cocktail options to keep you going on a second. After half an hour of turning yourself into human vodka on ice, you’ll then want to pop upstairs to Ski Lodge, their non-nippy bar, to hunt down a hot toddy and defrost by the open fire.
Din Heagney, Citysearch
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Chillon
January 05, 2012
IT HAS MOVED to: Southgate Complex MR6, 3 Southgate Ave Southbank It is bigger and better!
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