First Look: The Waterside Hotel Finally Reopens on Friday

Sand Hill Road co-owner and director Matt Mullins says “building pubs in Melbourne is our life’s work”. If that’s the case then The Waterside, on the corner of Flinders and King Streets in the CBD, is the group’s magnum opus.

The historical pub has undergone a dramatic transformation. Its cream-painted brick exterior, dome-shaped turret and French decorative glass have remained untouched for 99 years – but everything else is completely new. 

The mammoth seven-level pub, which opens on Friday November 14, has an outdoor terrace, three private event spaces, a ground-floor beer garden and public bar with a classic pub menu. There’s also a three-level Southeast Asian restaurant called Past Port (to open on Friday November 21).

The new building, designed by Techne Architects, is made of concrete, glass and steel and inspired by mid-century modern architecture. “That’s a fairly wild combination of styles,” Mullins previously told Broadsheet. “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.” 

The group worked with interior designer Eleisha Gray to create a ’50s and ’60s-inspired fit-out. Despite the massive overhaul, the public bar area has a nostalgic charm. Upside-down liquor bottles line the walls and are attached to old-school spirit dispensers reminiscent of ’60s taverns. There are mid-century details throughout the venue including terracotta breeze blocks, glass bricks, candy-coloured tiled pillars, geometric carpets and a buttercup yellow staircase with whimsical beads on its spindles. 

Past Port, which starts on the level three, has pale jade tones and ornate murals that draw from The Waterside executive chef Sarah Chan’s memories of traditional Peranakan furnishings in her grandparents’ home. 

Chan oversees all the food across the behemoth venue. While she’s designed a Southeast Asian menu that draws largely from her Chinese Malaysian heritage for Past Port, it’s mostly standard pub dishes in the beer garden and public bar.  

The former Mya Tiger and Morning Star Hotel head chef admits it can be hard to design a creative pub menu, but there are some exciting spins on the familiar here. The chicken parmigiana, for example, is made from brine-soaked chicken breast and is topped with herby sugo. And she likens standout spanner crab-topped potato cakes to thick and crunchy salt and vinegar Pringles. Some dishes also nod to head chef Kim Kim’s Korean heritage, including a rose prawn linguine tossed in gochujang, and hot honey Korean fried chicken served with pickled daikon on the side.

Sand Hill Road started work on The Waterside in 2019, but Covid put plans on pause and caused the group to totally rethink the space. 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, to focus solely on The Waterside. That same year, Mullins and fellow director Doug Maskiell picked up the conversation about reopening the pub. 

They realised the pub’s original narrow walkways and cramped back of house were less desirable in a post-pandemic world. They started talking about the design over drinks and began cutting out shapes using napkins in an attempt to construct a model of the space they were visualising. Mullins grabbed Officeworks supplies and sat around the kitchen table with his kids to build a cardboard prototype. That model, which still exists today, turned out to be a very close replica of the pub that’s reopening this week.

The pub is in a prime location. “You could put up 25 storeys of apartments or offices on this site,” says Mullins. But the group is committed to keeping pubs alive. “We desperately wanted to make sure that this remains a pub for another 100 years.” 

The Waterside Hotel
508 Flinders Street, Melbourne

Hours:
Mon to Thu midday–11pm
Fri & Sat midday–3am

@thewatersidehotel
watersidehotel.com.au