The Team That Revamped The Espy To Reopen The Waterside in the CBD in November

When the Sand Hill Road team began renovating The Waterside , a 99-year-old pub on the corner of Flinders and King streets in the CBD, the city was a completely different place.

In 2019, “we gutted the building to prepare for the renovation, and just at the time that we were about to start rebuilding and we started putting things back in, Covid hit,” Sand Hill Road co-owner Matt Mullins tells Broadsheet. In 2022, the group sold all its other pubs, including The Espy in St Kilda and Garden State Hotel on Flinders Lane, to Australian Venue Co, leaving focus solely on The Waterside, which is expected to reopen in November.

The heritage facade remains, but everything else is entirely new. The now mammoth seven-level pub will have an outdoor terrace; three private event spaces; a ground-floor beer garden and public bar with a classic pub menu; and a three-level Southeast Asian restaurant called Past Port that includes a rooftop cocktail bar. Executive chef Sarah Chan (formerly a chef at Longrain and The Espy’s Cantonese restaurant Mya Tiger ) will oversee the food across the entire venue. Mullins says the pub is “radically” different from what the team was planning pre-Covid. But as far as the food is concerned, “it was always Sarah’s concepts, expertise, passion and love that were going to run the show.”

The new building is made of concrete, glass and steel and inspired by mid-century modern architecture. “That’s a fairly wild combination of styles,” Mullins says. “But architecturally they do meld together really quite nicely, and it gave us a fair bit of freedom to think about how we wanted people to experience their time at the pub.

“We love the idea that walking into this pub now might give you a little bit of a sense of familiarity with the pubs that your dad took you to back in the ’70s and ’80s – pubs that were influenced by those mid-century modernist materials – and little echoes of that beautiful, innocent time back in the ’70s and ’80s when guys my age were kids.”

The Waterside at 508 Flinders Street, Melbourne , is expected to reopen in November.

watersidehotel.com.au