The Great Pub Renaissance

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Bobbie Peels, a corner pub in North Melbourne. Autumn has kicked in and co-owner Phil Gijsbers has wrapped a serious session with a leafblower under the almost-bare plane trees outside. As the sun trundles towards the horizon, winemaker Matt East sets up a tasting table of single-vineyard Yarra Valley chardonnay for the pub’s weekly tasting. 

An older woman sits at the bar drinking a pint of craft beer: it’s a good finish to her work-from-home day. Further along, a tradie in work boots asks for another glass of chablis. A dad comes in with a gaggle of kids for an early dinner: the table slowly fills with hummus and housemade flatbread, satay chicken skewers, hand-cut fried potatoes and polenta chips with chipotle aioli. Two young women chat life and the universe in the cosy nook in the centre of the two-storey building, christened Sir Robert Peel Hotel when it first opened in the 1860s. Then Run Club starts to drift in: mums and prams, dudes and dogs, active-wearing neighbours, office workers who use the provided facilities to change from suit to slicks. Gijsbers – who runs ultramarathons from time to time – will lead his crew of about 25 in a cruisy five-kilometre jog around nearby Royal Park before luring them back with 10 percent off dinner.

The six o’clock swill this ain’t. “Pubs are about meeting all kinds of people, whatever their needs are, and facilitating their connection with hospitality and one another,” says Gijsbers. He and business partners Neil Mills and chef Dave Watson keep three elements in mind when making decisions about direction. “The origin of the word ‘pub’ is public house: this is a place for everyone. We think about the word ‘hospitality’, which we see as guest-focused. And we have the restaurant aspect, which is ‘restoring’. We test all ideas against these concepts so we can play to our strengths and be authentic.”

The clarity of approach is striking, emblematic of new-style pubs that reshape for changing communities, recognising competition for attention and spend, and fashioning businesses to suit. “Times have changed significantly and pubs need to adapt and keep adapting,” says Scott Leach, a third-generation publican whose family has owned the Rose of Australia in Sydney’s Erskineville for 30 years. “Our inner-city community has gone through gentrification. In the early 1980s, this was the Bronx of Sydney. If a car drove past the venue and the tailpipe popped, it’s fair to say people would duck in the bar.” Last time I was at the Rose, my group sat on the footpath at a broad table, slurping oysters with yuzu mignonette and sipping rose sour cocktails, frothed with vegan aquafaba rather than egg white. Most of the cars going by were electric.

“We're constantly adapting to changes in consumer, leisure, and food and beverage markets,” says Leach. The march of technology has prompted the biggest shifts in his business, not just between his four walls (“I’m old enough to remember pre-computer cash registers and the red landline sitting on the bar”) but also in his customers’ lives. “People used to come to the pub for a couple of rounds of drinks to figure out what they were going to do for the night. Now they’re at work or home on their mobile phones, changing where they're going four times before they even get in the Uber.” Maybe they decide to stay on the couch after all, especially after a pandemic-inspired boom in speccing up homes. “My main competition is the lounge room, not the other pubs in the area,” says Leach. “People installed fantastic new barbecues, they have great TV setups. Getting them to leave home is a really big challenge.”

As well as being an independent publican, Leach is New South Wales president of the Australian Hotels Association, and was the AHA’s national president from 2016 to 2022. One big conversation among publicans is the need to adapt swiftly to demographic shifts. “Millennials [born 1981 to 1996] and Gen Z [1997 to 2012] have different tastes and preferences. Many younger people are in bed a lot earlier and up at 5am doing yoga.” He notes that there’s very little alcohol sold before midday, while coffee spend is around $8 billion per year. In nearby Camperdown, the Alfred Hotel has opened Freddies Cafe and Coffee Cart, servicing the nearby hospital from 5.30am weekdays. The beer taps are silent but the espresso machine is roaring. “There's a queue around the block every morning,” he says.

Earning Millennials’ business when they do feel like an alcoholic drink is all about differentiation and the upsell that can come with it. “The best example is that we encourage people to personalise their margarita,” says Leach. “Once upon a time it would have been: get the cheapest tequila, make the most money and just sell it. Today, it’s about acknowledging that the consumer is educated. They can select from a range of 40 tequilas and mezcals to get the exact flavour profile they want. People love to put their stamp on their meal, their drink, their experience. The challenge for venues is to embrace that and run with it.”

Looking to the future doesn’t mean shrugging off every aspect of the past: revitalised pubs are tapping into retro yearnings. Melbourne’s Punters Club reopened with a worn, tactile fit-out that suggests slower, easier times. More pubs are explicitly disavowing gambling. Woolloomooloo’s East Sydney Hotel puts “no pokies” first when describing itself on its website.

For inner-city pubs like these, success means meeting your customers more than halfway. For country pubs, the situation is more complex, with local trade not always enough to keep a business afloat, and cost-of-living pressures biting especially hard in the regions. Stoph Pilmore is publican at the handsome Victoria Hotel in Dimboola, which he and wife Meran have run for 10 years. “We are constantly reinventing ourselves,” he says. “People are understandably looking at their dollars and cents but we are at the coalface: power is up, beer is up.” When he took on the pub, he was making 70 percent profit on each beer sold. “Now we’re lucky to get between 59 percent and 64 percent. Yet business costs have gone up, staff pay has risen, super has gone up.”

Despite the challenges, Pilmore is in no doubt of the value he brings to Dimboola. “Country pubs are unique. Our venue gets used by local service clubs having meetings and a meal in the back room on a Thursday night, sporting clubs patronise the hotel because we sponsor them: there’s that give and take and personal relationships.” I stayed in Dimboola last month and walked around the town in the late afternoon. On the wide sun-splashed pavement, a handful of blokes sat with their beers, monitoring the comings and goings. “They live by themselves,” says Pilmore. “At three o'clock, they will wander in, be grumpy with one another and carry on. It’s connection, whether it’s talking to my staff or among themselves. Cafes are short and sharp. Restaurants are more focused on a table. In a public bar, your conversation may not just be yours, it becomes the conversation for the group that’s sitting around. Pubs are hugely important.”

The New South Wales town of Grong Grong was so concerned that their local pub might close that residents banded together to buy it. The Royal Hotel was put up for sale during the pandemic, prompting community members to source local investment and  – hopefully – prevent their watering hole from being one of the 20 or 30 New South Wales country pubs that close each year. The consortium ended up raising over $1 million from 169 shareholders, allowing them to not only purchase the 1875 building near the Newell Highway, but also to renovate it. ‘Grongy’ pub now hosts school and fishing club raffles and chats with the community via Facebook as well as the front bar. A recent post gives the flavour: “We are running low on change, if you have any coins other than 5 and 10 cents and if you want to swap it for notes please drop into the pub. Cheers.”

At the other end of the scale, an increasing number of pubs are owned by groups both large and small. AusVenueCo is among the biggest, with almost 220 pubs across every state plus the Northern Territory. Far from reaching out to pub goers for spare dollar coins, the group has turned its reach into a media marketplace. It spruiks the ability for brands to get their message in front of 15 million AusVenueCo customers via everything from beer garden umbrellas to digital menus to marketing emails. “Scale can be fantastic,” says Scott Leach. “Groups and independents are both relevant in the marketplace. An owner-operator like me can bring a personality and dynamic, not just in terms of the actual floor service and the way we physically operate, but also in the fact that we can pivot faster and do things that are a little edgier.”

The Bobbie Peels crew recently made a chicken parmigiana pivot. When they opened in 2022, the pub was a parma-free zone as part of a push to distinguish the venue as new-school and shrugging off pub cliches. But for Coeliac Awareness Week this March, Bobbie Peels added a gluten-free chicken parma to the classy gastropub menu. “We asked ourselves, ‘What’s something coeliacs can’t normally have’ and people went nuts for it,” says Phil Gijsbers. The response was so positive, it’s now on the regular menu. 

“Groups will choose the pub because they have one coeliac friend but when we go around the table taking orders, it’s ‘parma parma parma.’ That’s us listening to the crowd. Once again, it’s all about inclusion and community.”

Pub Rules

1. Consider accommodation: staying at the pub is back in fashion. North Melbourne’s Central Club Hotel reopened two years ago with accommodation; Sydney’s Crystal Palace Hotel in Haymarket sold for a reported $35 million in April, at least partly because it has 21 suites near Central Station.

2. Rev up non-alc: whether it’s cultural practices or health kicks, many people are cutting out or reducing alcohol. Smart businesses respond with brilliant booze-free beverages.

3. Better food: consumers can get beer, wine, cocktails and a good feed in so many places so pubs can no longer count on crappy counter meals. Add some magic to your menu.

4. But make it good value: punters still associate pubs with affordability. Whether it’s specials, locals deals or clever menu engineering, it’s important for people to think of your pub as a frequent pitstop not a fancy occasion.

5. Think laterally to look after locals: have a Dog Day like the Erko, start a Run Club like Bobbie Peels, run Drag Trivia like the Fox Hotel. Look to your own community, rather than copying other pubs.