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When Melbourne’s Caretaker’s Cottage opened, the cosy inner-city bar quickly became a hospitality unicorn: the kind of wildly popular venue that was as beloved by crowds as it was critics.
Three years later, with queues still stretching down the street and international accolades piling up, the question was not so much whether the trio would open another venue, but where and when. The answer? August 2025 in the site of a former textile mill, just a stone’s throw down the road.
“We fell in love with [the site] straightaway,” says co-owner Ryan Noreiks of the new bar, Three Horses. “I think we’re drawn to places that have character to them.”
Character was something the venue had in abundance. When Ryan and his co-owners took over, the bar’s brick walls were hidden by alphafoil, and the equipment was coated in a thick layer of dust and grease. “We pulled off the fake walls, rippled up the fake floor and this beautiful venue started coming back. It was almost like watering a plant that had been forgotten.”
Today, the alphafoil has been replaced by a brightly coloured artwork, and the once-dusty room flickers with candlelight.
Right from the start, the trio were clear about several things. They wanted Three Horses to have its own personality. (“We didn’t want it be Caretakers [number] two.”) They wanted sherry to play a starring role. And Square would be the point-of-sale system.
“Square is one of the best decisions we ever made,” says Ryan.
How Square’s data helps shape Three Horses
Square even helped shape one of Three Horses’ defining features: its focus on sherry.
“Sherry is woven into pretty much everything we do,” says Ryan, who explains that the fixation began while he and co-owners Rob Libecans and Matt Stirling were in Madrid for an awards ceremony and discovered a 100-year-old sherry house. “There was no music, no seats, and it was pretty abrasive service,” recalls Ryan. “But you stand shoulder to shoulder with the person next to you and within 10 minutes you’re swapping life stories.”
They were determined to recreate some of that chemistry in Melbourne, and began entertaining the idea of sherry bar. Looking through their Square dashboard, they realised that the data validated their idea. “We looked back over our most popular cocktails sales over the last three years at Caretaker’s [Cottage] – and all of them have sherry in them.
“That’s one of the best things about Square – it’s really easy to look that kind of stuff up.”
Today, says Ryan, “I would say that 98 per cent of the cocktails have a sherry component, whether it’s the hero component or it’s a secondary or tertiary element.”
Data-driven efficiencies
That’s not the only way Three Horses deploys Square’s insights. At the end of every shift, the team reviews reports, tracking the day’s sales, top sellers and performance over time.
“It’s so easy. You set a timeline, press ‘report’ – and bang, everything’s there,” says Ryan. “It’s especially useful when we do menu launches because you can see what’s working.”
Square’s data has also helped drive cost efficiencies, says Ryan. After reviewing Square data, the team realised that while Fridays and Saturdays remained strong late into the night, trade between midnight and 1am on weekdays was comparatively slow.
Rather than staffing those quieter hours, Three Horses now closes at midnight from Monday to Thursday, redeploying the extra time for staff training.
“Our whole team works full time with us, so we started thinking about how we could use those hours better,” says Ryan. “Now we can use that time for staff training, music theory, one-on-one time with our HR team. All it took was pulling up a couple of reports in Square. It was pretty easy to see.”
Simplicity and speed
For busy venues like Caretaker’s Cottage and Three Horses, speed is paramount. “It’s getting busier and busier here, and especially at Caretakers’ everyone’s just lining up getting a drink order. Here, we can do 300 to 400 cocktails in a service if we’re busy,” says Ryan, who explains that Square is exceptionally simple and easy to use.
Three Horses has three Square iPads and three small tap-and-chip Square Readers. “The bar here is about six or seven metres long, so we can just throw the [readers] along the bar. No matter where the service is going, we can just follow. There’s no dragging cords around.”
An all-in-one solution
With Square, the point-of-sale system, payments and reporting sit inside the same platform – and during busy periods that saves time, says Ryan.
“If a customer comes up and says, ‘Hey you actually overcharged me,’ you can immediately tap their card and refund the sale. Within minutes the money is back in their account.”
By contrast, older setups that rely on separate POS systems, EFTPOS terminals and banking providers can make refunds slow. Staff often need to manually search for transactions, while customers can wait days for the refund to hit their account, says Ryan.
“The customer goes away thinking, ‘Did I just get scammed?’” says Ryan. “Square just solves that problem straightaway, and the customer can go back to having fun with their friends.
“That closed-loop service is one of the biggest reasons we love Square so much. It aligns with how we do service here: it’s fast, it’s fun but the second there’s a problem it gets solved straightaway.”
A customer-friendly approach
Square also offers a customer-friendly interface. When customers request a receipt, staff simply turn the iPad screen around so the customer can tap a button and choose whether to receive it via text, paper or email.
“Because you’re turning the iPad around to them, they’re choosing for themselves. It helps us empower the customer to be in control of their payment.”
A speedy interface
Training staff is equally straightforward thanks to Square’s intuitive interface, says Ryan. “It’s, like, minutes,” he says. Updating the menu is just as easy. “We can do a full menu change in about half an hour. You can change a [single] item in a minute.”
Menu changes can even be done on the fly. “If staff realise that, let’s say, I’ve put the wrong price in for a drink, then instead of going back of house they can just hold their finger down on the iPad and change the price of a name straight away.”
Would Ryan recommend Square to other business owners? “The Square terminal is the easiest part of our venue. We’ve never had to think twice about it.”
