Saltwater Social Club: two storeys, open seven nights

What it is

A two-storey late-night bar in the centre of town: a main bar with DJs and a dancefloor, a game room with pool and shuffleboard, and an upstairs library bar with a fireplace. It describes itself as open every night, and as a nightclub as readily as a bar.

Almost every other drinking room in this register is attached to a kitchen and closes when the food stops. Two are not, and this is the larger of them.

A game room is a more deliberate decision than it looks. Pool and shuffleboard give a room something to do that is not standing at a bar, which is how a venue holds a crowd through the hours when the restaurants have emptied onto the street and everyone is deciding whether the night is over.

What it fixes about a Byron night

The complaint visitors make most consistently about this town is that it shuts early, and the register explains why: the good rooms are restaurants, and a restaurant's licence and staffing both point at the kitchen. When the kitchen closes the room follows.

So the late part of the evening lands in a small number of buildings — the pubs, and the two dedicated bars. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you wanted from the night, but it is worth knowing before eleven, not at it.

A game room and an upstairs bar with a fireplace are the other half of the answer. Both exist to give a room something to do that is not drinking at a bar, which is how a venue holds people past the hour when the restaurants have emptied onto the street.

The two-bar problem

Only two rooms in the shire are built as bars rather than as restaurants that serve drinks, and both are in the centre of town. Everything else that pours after ten is a pub.

That is a thin layer for a place with Byron's reputation, and it is the single biggest gap between what visitors expect of this town and what it actually has. The register cannot tell you whether that is a good thing. It can tell you the number, which no guide written in 2017 will.

A bar with a menu and no address on file

It publishes a menu, which not every drinking room does, and this register holds no confirmed street address for it. That pairing is the reverse of what you would expect from a two-storey bar in the middle of town: the hardest thing to pin down here is the door.

49 of the 67 rows carry an address from a source that names the venue — structured data on its own site, a directory entry, or a footer that repeats across pages. Where one is missing it is because none of those produced one, not because nobody looked.

What else is close

From the register. Street rows need a confirmed address (49 of 67).

At Byron Bay town	37 other venues — see the register
Nearest other cluster	Byron Arts & Industry Estate, 4.1 km — 100 Mile Table, Bun Coffee, Byron Bay Spirits Distillery, Lord Byron Distillery

Where it appears in this guide

Saltwater Social Club is listed on bars, and in the full register with the month its status was last confirmed.