Written by last week’s sketch-guess winner: Jane
Sprink invited me to write this week’s Eat/Drink review by way of reward for guessing that last week’s sketch was in the vague vicinity of the Docklands and definitely nothing to do with her going to Bali the basic bogan she is. I love WINNING so I eagerly agreed. She gave me the directive “don’t try to be too cool but just be kewl” which is frankly terrifying, and also “be funny” and I’m literally dead from the pressure RIP me.
SO – I managed to convince my housemate and her boyfriend that we should leave our perfect, warm, lovely house on a school night so we could go somewhere I could write about, and off we trotted to a pub that Broadsheet probably reviewed ten years ago, if at all: The Great Northern Hotel.
Part of the reason we chose the Great Northern is because my housemate’s boyfriend wanted to see what it was like “after the renovation”, which from what I can tell is not a thing that occurred in my lifetime. The ambience is as you’d expect and hope for a pub in the inner north: sort of RSL-for-young-people meets high school common room, and there was sports playing on the TV, which didn’t mean much to me but was pretty exciting for a lot of people there. At one stage three guys came in wearing almost matching jackets, they were cute (we all agreed: would bone) but why the nearly matching outfits – was it intentional? We spent most of the rest of the evening pondering the jacket trio. Oh sorry the review:
- The steaks were excellent and the Shiraz was what you want in a house red (alcoholic and unmemorable – Sprink can you please insert a funny joke about my ex-boyfriend)
- They WILL add mashed potatoes to any meal even if they act reluctant about it. Their mash has about a 50/50 garlic to potato ratio and is the best three dollars you will ever spend, and I say this even knowing that there is a store in Collingwood that still sells Pollywaffles.
- Also the lighting is NOT first date friendly. At all.
