Public House Petersham

Farewell, Newington Inn Hotel. Welcome to the neighbourhood, Public House Petersham. There's a bottle-shop cat named Gizmo, beer and wine on tap and Fox Sports on the telly. What more do you want in a pub? A community garden? They've got that too.  

Solotel​ hospitality group (which also counts Opera Bar, The Golden Sheaf and Newtown's Courthouse Hotel in its portfolio) bought the Newington Inn on Stanmore Road back in January. It was beer and raffles as usual until a week-long closure in September for renovations and a relaunch as the all new, slightly improved Public House Petersham.

This is a beaut pub to take the kids. There's no ball-pit babysitter a la The Henson in Marrickville but inside, there's a long table suited for family lunches, plenty of space for tykes to run around and be mental and a games room for post-meal pinball. In the wake of Solotel's takeover, there's also an odd collection of framed LPs scattered across the walls (Jason Donovan? Kylie Mole?) and, for no clear reason, a poster of the 1982 smash-hit 48 Hrs. starring up-and-coming comedian Eddie Murphy.  

The renovation money is better displayed outdoors where the beer garden (still huge) is now much happier with herbs and ferns, street-art murals, converted shipping containers and the brightest of bright-red stools. Ideal for wearing your second-best pair of dress shorts, parking a Bugaboo and eating modestly priced steak (which at Public House equals a 250-gram, grain-fed rump for $22).

Czech Republic-born chef Martin Cerny is in charge of the kitchen. I'd love to see him flex a bit more of his Central European heritage on the menu, which for the most part is standard pub fare with a watermelon, haloumi and Hawkesbury squid salad ($24) thrown in for summery measure.

Think about how excellent it would be that instead of a half-decent, buttermilk chicken burger with Swiss cheese, pineapple and Thousand Island dressing ($19) or just-OK wood-fired pizza ($19 for a margherita) you could rock up to a pub and be served an awesome game-based goulash with your schooner?

Cerny does Czech out in one dish – the $37 "Pigfest Platter", which, if you bypass the terrible name, might be the best thing on the menu. A wooden board of smoked, fatty house-made sausage, wood-fired pork knuckle, bready dumplings, a winter's worth of sauerkraut and a slab of pork belly that reminds you why you fell in love with the cut in the first place. Na zdravie!

Marrickville's Sparrow and Vine service four taps of wine (pinot grigio, arneis, sangiovese, grenache) and local beer knocks heads with VB and Reschs at the bar.

I love a cheeky litre of tap wine for $50 on a Monday night, so it was upsetting that on our visit the plonk taps were out of order due to some pressurisation issues. Thankfully, I also love a splash of weekday gin so hurrah for the Hard Lemonade ($16) – a jar of Beefeater, elderflower liqueur and house-made lemonade that's surprisingly balanced for a pub cocktail.

The community spirit was always strong at the Newington Inn and its new owners are keen to keep it that way. There's a garden where locals can plant their own oak lettuce, a space that can be hired out for anything from crochet groups to ukulele jams and local beer and music days scheduled for the future.

It doesn't get as rowdy as the Oxford Tavern up the road, but a quiet beer at sunset can be just as fun as seven rounds of Melbourne Bitter before midnight. Well, some of the time anyway.

THE LOW-DOWN
Go for… an early evening schooner on the beer garden.
Stay for… pizza and pinball.
Drink… a carafe of tap wine.
And… Newtown's Cow and Moon supplies award-winning gelato for dessert.