The Standard Hotel
There are two types of people in this world:
good people, and shitty people.
Good people walk into a pub, see a reserved sign on a table and keep walking.
Shitty people on the other hand see the reserved sign and sit down at the table anyway, then scrunch up the sign and hide it.
AND HIDE IT!
Yes. Unfortunately this is a true story. These people actually exist!
There’s something about Winter that makes me crave a good pub meal. It must be something to do with the coziness of the pub and the heartiness of the food. Myself, Mr and our good friends D & T had been hoping to pig out on paella at The Robert Burns Hotel, but being a Friday night it was fully booked. I’d heard on the grapevine that The Standard Hotel was worth checking out, so off we went.
Our booking was for 730pm, but we hit bad traffic on our way. As most people would, I called The Standard to say that we would be 10 – 15minutes late – “not a problem” they said. When we arrived it was absolutely PACKED. As The Standard has several little sections and we had never visited before, we had no idea where to go.
T and I approached the bar and enquired about our booking. A bored-looking waitress vaguely waved her hand in the direction of the dining room and muttered ‘your table’s in there’. We walked in the direction of the hand wave. No table. A packed room full of diners and no table.
Back we went to the bored waitress. We waited five minutes at the bar to be served again. “Excuse me” I said, “There doesn’t appear to be a free table in that room, could you please show us where we are supposed to be sitting?” thinking “and if you had done this in the first place we would have been ordering by now rather than standing around like a bunch of idiots for 10 minutes”.
The waitress led us into the same tiny room with no free tables. She marched straight up to a table of 30-somethings who immediately looked embarrassed and produced this scrunched up piece of paper from one of their pockets:
Assholes. They had stolen our table and connected it to the booth they already had. They looked very embarrassed as they moved while the whole room watched, and they damn well should have. WHO DOES THAT?! And hey, seriously, dude who said ‘Oh sorry’ as he moved, why did you? If you’re going to do something nasty like that, don’t bother to apologise ok? RARGH!
If you are in a pub and you think that a booking might not be coming, you ask the staff if you can sit at their table. Or you sit there until the booking arrives. YOU DON’T HIDE THE BLOODY BOOKING!
OH and THEN the idiots had the nerve to ask if they could use one of our chairs! Because we are far superior people than them, we kindly said yes.
So the other patrons might be horrible people with zero manners, and the waitresses might look annoyed when you ask them to do their job, but THE FOOD IS FANTASTIC. We took about 20 minutes to order from the menu, unable to decide what we wanted. The four of us then declared that we would return once a month until we had tried absolutely everything.
While we were waiting for our food, one of the waitresses brought over an order that wasn’t ours. It belonged to the idiots who stole our table. Which means they had enough time to not only steal our table and hide the reservation too, but order food as well. WHICH MEANS that they did all of this around 730pm – they stole the booking AT THE BOOKING TIME! I should be a detective.
For entrees we shared a plate of saganaki and cevapcici sausage rolls. I had stupidly left my super dooper fancy camera at home (I was going to be brave and try to use it in a restaurant for the first time) but T kindly lent me her little point and shoot:
You can’t really go wrong with saganaki, but it was a decent amount of fried heart attacky goodness for $10. D explained to us that Cevapcici are an Eastern European dish and are basically skinless sausages, so the sausage rolls were skinless sausages with pastry! They were nom. The spicy relish was delicious too. I may or may not have dipped my saganaki in there..
As a main D & T ordered the lamb shanks from the specials board:
As the plates of lamb were brought to the table there was the most mouthwatering fragrance of olives that engulfed the table. It was heavenly. There was a huge amount of meat and it fell off the bones, as it should.
I ordered the chicken parma. A favourite from when I was a little kid and used to go out with my Mum and Dad for dinner in Northbridge (Perth) on Saturday nights. This one was pretty good:
Yes that is feta you can see in the middle. Mmmm. My only gripe is that there wasn’t enough tomato sauce and therefore the ends were a little dry. Other than that, this parma was exactly what I had been craving all week – hearty pub food. The chips weren’t anything amazing but they were tasty and didn’t require extra seasoning. I ended up eating way more of this than I should have. Good thing I wore a stretchy dress.
Mr ordered ‘Jonathon’s Sausages’:
Although they weren’t as tasty as these, they were pretty good. Although this meal seemed to be a lot smaller than the parma and the shanks. Perhaps Mr just ate his faster.
All up it was $35 each for shared entrees, a giant main course and a bottle of wine. Not bad at all. We will definitely be back. I may dress as a hipster next time and see if we get better service. Or perhaps I need to become a regular? Once the weather warms up I’d really like to check out their beer garden too.
So the next time you’re looking for a decent pub meal, check out The Standard Hotel. If someone steals your table, punch them in the face for me would you?
The Standard Hotel 293 Fitzroy Street Fitzroy 3065
Food gobbler. Wine lover. Kitteh keeper. Gen-Y. Fiancée. Twitter addict.
Fighting the war against Leggings As Pants one fashion victim at a time... 
As long as you didn’t try to order a bowl of chips. Ordering off the menu is frowned upon and suggesting that they get a bowl and put hot chips into it, while it seems a simple enough combination, will have you labelled as a smartarse, and you will still remain chipless. (I love the food but haven’t been back after the chip incident.)
WOW! GOOD ON YA to stick to your guns! I heard my friends went to the movies and someone took their seats. They showed their tix to those arseholes and those arseholes went “well we’ve lost our tickets and we’re taking these seats” AND MY FRIENDS didn’t even argue and just went and sat on the front row! I would have made such a racket until the arseholes leave- even the thought of my friends getting bullied like that makes my blood boil! At least your arseholes are embarassed, but still- what arsehollleeeees!
Pfft people stealing reserved signs… What is this world coming to?! However, that parma does looks delicious. I’ve never craved a parma for breakfast before, but I’m pretty sure I could devour one now!
G – I can’t believe you would DARE to be so bold. ;)
Piggy – Secret confession – I once accidentally stole seats at the movies. And I was embarrassed. Because I’m not AN ASSHOLE!
Kim – Yeah. As far as breakfast parmas go, this one would be pretty rocking.
Mmm… I always find it hard to go past bangers and mash! This post is making me hungry!
What I’m surprised about is that the guy fished the scrunched up reservation out of his pocket. If you’re going to be scummy, why not go the whole hog and feign cluelessness?
Miss M, Thanks for posting about the Standard Hotel. Melbourne has so many great pubs, but the Standard is up near the top of my list, I’m glad to hear that they are still cranking out great pub grub.
Another pub, close by is the Napier. I highly recommend it (though it’s been a few years since i was there last) and it would be great to see you write it up.
Cheers.