Fitzroy North's Royal Oak Hotel feels like the real deal again

I missed the pub. I missed it when I lived overseas, and I missed it during the lockdowns that robbed us of parmas and beers with friends for two long winters.

During those lockdowns, my local – a place with a roaring fireplace and a great trivia night and publicans who would look after my teenager when he got locked out of the house – closed its doors for good.

I've found a replacement, with better food and worse beer and no trivia night, but it doesn't have that boisterous, crowded sense of community that once defined my pub experience. I reckon we took that for granted in the before-times. But not now.

Which is why I felt such a rush of joy when walking into the very old, and kind of new, Royal Oak Hotel in Fitzroy North. The past few years have been iffy for this particular pub, even beyond the COVID interruptions. At some point, when a new operator took over, I went in to find the older features of the room stripped back to the nub, wiring hanging from ceilings, bad attempts at a modern paint job left half-finished and out of place. Someone was clearly in over their heads.

But now, after another change in ownership that includes some of the folks who run the Marquis of Lorne in Fitzroy, the old building feels like the real deal again.

The front bar is expansive, with high-top tables and large booths for groups, and vintage paintings rather than televisions dot the walls. The dining room at the back has one of those roaring fireplaces. And the place is packed. It has all the babble and guffaw of a great pub filled with revellers.

The chef (and one of the owners) is Scott Stevenson, who was the head chef at MoVida for three years. His menu has a few elevated pub classics – beer-battered rockling and chips and a dill-heavy tartare sauce ($28); a chicken schnitzel with mustard gravy and a bracing fennel and radicchio salad ($26) – and plenty that goes beyond standard pub fare.

I loved the lamb cigars with harissa ($16), which pack an inordinate amount of stewy, lamby flavour into their crisp pastry wrappers. Same for the grilled leeks ($16), which achieve that wonderful melting/crunchy leek magic, accompanied by gribiche, parsley and pangrattato.

When it came to mains, my favourite dish was the vegetarian option: a lovely delicate panzotti pasta ($26) with silverbeet, ricotta and walnut pesto.

If you're looking for a side dish, you should not miss the sprouting broccoli with gruyere sauce ($14), an elegant rendering of the classic broccoli-drenched-in-cheese-sauce that hits all the right notes.

I get the feeling that Stevenson is still getting his legs here, and there are dishes that show it. The smoked lentils under a pair of pork sausages ($28) were so overwhelmingly smoky – and a little bit bitter – that I suspected he may be using Liquid Smoke, though Stevenson tells me that's not the case.

I expected more from an entree sold as "globe artichokes" ($18) than two slivers of artichoke hearts and two rounds of artichoke stems, again along with buffalo mozzarella, endive leaves, and a couple of Oritz anchovies.

This isn't the greatest beer selection in town, but there are plenty of good choices beyond Carlton Draught (they have that, too). Same goes for the wine list.

The cocktail game is decidedly mixed, and I suspect your success will depend greatly on who's making your drink. I had a fantastic pared-back pina colada one night, served in a coupe and beautifully balanced, and then a terrible pineapple smash a few nights later, which tasted like something I foraged from my nana's liquor cabinet when I was 14: sickly-sweet cordial mixed with tequila.

But overall, this is a place with aspirations to be just like your favourite neighbourhood pub but better, and it mainly reaches those goals. Its greatest achievement is in the feeling of community, in the crowds that are gathering there and in the tone of the service, which is friendly above all else – even when they're slammed and you're hungry and it takes them a while to get to you.

If there's one thing you can say for those long years we spent alone and inside our homes, it certainly made us (or, me, more accurately) infinitely more appreciative.

And entering the new version of the Royal Oak gave me that tingly feeling, like: We're back. The pub is back. Melbourne is back.

Vibe: Classic pub with a classy veneer

Go-to dish: Lamb cigars, $16

Drinks: Focused list of beers on tap, wines by the glass and bottle, and cocktails

Cost: About $100 for two, excluding drinks