Naked for Satan

The name of this bar is not a marketing gimmick. It is based on a real person and a genuinely wild true story. Around nineteen twenty-eight, a man named Leon Satanovich fled the Russian pogroms and made his way to Melbourne, where he found work as a cleaner and caretaker at the Moran and Cato building right here on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. The neighbourhood quickly nicknamed him Satan.

During the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties, part of the building was shut down. Satanovich, being resourceful, set up an illegal vodka distillery in the basement using copper boilers and water tanks he found abandoned in a warehouse. The heat generated by his distilling equipment was so intense that he had to work almost completely naked. And that is how the phrase let's get naked for Satan became the secret code among locals who wanted to buy his bootleg vodka. It was the Fitzroy speakeasy, Depression-era style.

When the modern bar opened in two thousand and ten in the same Moran and Cato building, it took the name as a tribute. The owners, Max and Pat Fink, who also created popular Melbourne venues like Bimbo and Lucky Coq, embraced the story completely. They even distill their own gin and vodka on site, a direct nod to Satanovich's basement operation. The rooftop terrace, called Naked in the Sky, has some of the best views in Fitzroy, looking out over the rooftops toward the city. And the pintxos, those little Basque-style snacks on toothpicks, are legendary. You grab them from the bar and they charge you by counting the toothpicks at the end. The whole place runs on trust, which feels right for a bar named after a bootlegger.