Dill Pickle Club: Vinyl, Reel-to-Reel, and Tasmania's First Listening Bar
Upstairs on St John Street, Tasmania's first listening bar keeps a Chicago name and a room built for talking quietly over records.
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Venue Name: Dill Pickle Club
Address: Level 1, 74–82 St John Street, Launceston, Tasmania 7250, Australia
Website: None published — no standalone site found
Instagram: @dill.pickle.club
Tooker Alley was a short lane off Dearborn Street in Chicago's Near North Side, and for most of the 1920s the loudest room on it was a converted stable where Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, Clarence Darrow and Emma Goldman went to argue. Jack Jones ran it. He called it the Dil Pickle Club, spelled with one L, and it operated as a free-speech forum, a theatre, a speakeasy and one of the earliest gathering places for queer social life in the city. It closed in the early thirties. It has been gone for ninety years and people still write about it.
Ninety years later and ten thousand miles south, there is a staircase between two shopfronts in Launceston.
You would walk past it. That seems to be the design. The Dill Pickle Club — two Ls this time — sits on the first floor of a 1960s commercial building at 74–82 St John Street, above Tatler Parade, and it opened in late January 2025 as the first listening bar in Tasmania. Robyn Schorn and David Micallef built it. Micallef has said the acoustics mattered from the start, and that the record player should carry through the room without ever costing anyone a conversation. That is a specific choice and not a small one. It puts the room closer to a good living room than to a kissa, where the rule is silence and the music is the only thing permitted to speak.
The room itself is unusual enough that most people who write about it end up listing its parts. A mustard floor. Terracotta booths. Tasmanian blackwood and acoustic panelling. A bar that sweeps from the doorway round towards Tatler Lane, with vintage hi-fi equipment shelved alongside the wine and the whisky, so the machinery is furniture rather than apparatus. Curtains that soften what comes in from the street. Books and board games you help yourself to. Some describe the effect as mid-century modern, some as mid-century modern crossed with something Eastern Bloc, which is a stranger and probably more accurate reading.
What plays is vinyl and reel-to-reel tape, drawn from anywhere between the 1920s and this year, chosen for the hour rather than the genre. Reel-to-reel is worth pausing on. It is the harder format to run in a bar — the tape is expensive, the machines want attention, and almost nobody in the room will know what they are hearing. Putting one behind the bar is a statement made mostly to yourself.
Micallef traces the name to the delicatessen in The Blues Brothers, and to a record shop called Dill Pickle Records he planned about a decade ago and never opened. The Chicago echo may be accidental. It has not stayed accidental. The bar's own posts run to things like convict dissent in the 1820s and the labour struggles that followed it, and they have put on evenings under titles that sound more like broadsides than DJ sets. Whatever the founders meant, the room has drifted towards its namesake: a place where people go upstairs to hear something and end up arguing about it.
The drinks are classic cocktails, local wine and beer, a tight whisky list, moonshine. There are cheese and dips and a fried pickle platter, which is the kind of joke a bar is allowed exactly once. At opening the doors went back at 4pm, Thursday to Sunday; check before you travel, because a bar eighteen months old moves. A balcony and rooftop were planned. They may exist by now.
Nobody has published what the system is. No brand, no cabinet, no cartridge — every account says carefully tuned and stops there, which usually means nobody thought to ask. I have not sat in the room, so I am not going to tell you how it sounds.
But I know what a staircase between two shopfronts is for. It is a filter. It removes everyone who was not looking, which is the oldest trick a listening room has, and the one Tooker Alley knew too.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. Read more from Tracks & Tales Daily, subscribe, or browse the full venue index.
