The Espy is back for summer and it’s one of Melbourne’s best pubs
The new Espy is the greatest re-imagining of what a pub looks, feels, sounds and tastes like in 21st century Melbourne, writes Dan Stock.
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It could’ve gone so wrong.
In other hands, a many zero makeover of the 140-year-old grande dame of the St Kilda foreshore might’ve amounted to little more than soaring views with soulless brews and brainless chews and apartment dwellers loudly complaining about the din.
Thankfully, the reborn Espy is anything but.
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Eighteen months and almost as many millions later, the Sand Hill Road group — a quintet made up of brothers Andy and Matt Mullins, Doug Maskiell, Tom Birch and Andrew Lark — has set forth the most ambitious, most prominent and most high-pressure project they’ve yet embarked.
For most of Melbourne has memories of The Espy. All of Melbourne will have an opinion on this new era.
Everything the team has done over the past 18-odd years has led to this point. From their first pub, the Commercial Club Hotel, through to the CBD’s modern Garden State Hotel, I’ve drunk beers in them all and watched the evolution of their modern interpretation of the local pub.
The Espy is now the undoubted crowning glory, for it is the greatest reimagining of what a pub looks like, feels like, sounds and tastes like, in 21st century Melbourne.
It’s astonishingly impressive, managing to feel both original and new yet lived-in and loved, and though but a fortnight old, across a few visits it’s clear a broad church aged anywhere from 18 to 80 is already enjoying her rekindled charms.
There are fading rockers and brightly bespectacled gallerists, pretty Prahran boys and handsome Beaumaris ladies and business blokes and sauvignon blondes alongside backpackers fresh off the beach.
With 12 bars, three music stages — including the famous Gershwin room — two restaurants and a license for 1700, it’s a mammoth space though with myriad nooks to hide away in it never feels vast.
There are outside tables and an indoor balcony while the main bar channels a hot Havana night, the terrace with retractable roof delivering a humidly tropical and breezy vibe.
There’s a public bar that somehow already smells of beer and the faint hint of BO just like a public bar should, and a hidden top floor cocktail bar you need to quietly ask for entry to at the front desk.
Given the plethora of places to play in you’ll be greeted and guided at the door — just one of the very clever touches that speaks of true hospitality from a huge staff, all of which are friendly, many of which are right across the brief.
On the food front, The Espy Kitchen is the workhorse with chef Ashly Hicks putting every “learning” from feeding 800 at Garden State into play here across a carte of wood-fried pizza and easy going snacks, rotisserie meats and a strong showing from the sea.
It’s a big menu with much you’ll want to eat, but I’d suggest ordering in stages so you don’t get everything All. At. Once.
Though we couldn’t have been clearer about our intentions, within a few minutes there was the pizza and crab tostadas and zucchini salad and snapper all jostling for space on our table alongside the meatballs and octopus and wine and waterglasses.
A pox on both houses. Nonetheless much of the food is good, some excellent.
Properly textural pork meatballs come in a terrifically tasty sugo with a hit of black garlic sweetness ($14), while those little tostadas are a two bite win of sweet spanner crab, avo and green chilli heat ($12).
From the wood oven, the pizza we tried was fine, if on the small size, a chewy pliable base with a char mark or two topped with punchy, powerful njuda, mozzarella and basil ($19).
A whole snapper ($46) done on the grill is great, the flesh firm and flaky, a buttery sauce with bursts of native lime lick-the-plate delicious, though a plate of “grilled” octopus is far too mushy to be enjoyable ($18).
The sides/salads are a highlight — a very clever combo of confit leek and charred zucchini comes on a cloud of smoked yoghurt ($9); charry broccoli and crisp kale with a sharp lemony tahini and dukkah is all sorts of tasty virtue ($8).
The lack of serving cutlery across all dishes is, however, a strange omission (just try dishing up salad with knife and fork).
Out in the main bar, along with an impressive selection of worldly beers — and a fine Aperol Spritz on tap — you’ll find pub classics and the cheeseburger is right up there with the best.
A nicely seasoned hefty patty fills the bun to the last bite, with melted American cheese, pickles, onion and tomato. Pity the chips are rubbish ($22).
Upstairs, you’ll find the modern Cantonese restaurant Mya Tiger with Sarah Chan (Longrain, Lotus Dining) in the kitchen.
It’s yet another great space — its attendant bar is velvet soft and raffishly stylish — where you can smash bowls of slippery chicken dumplings with a bright ginger heat ($16), silken parcels of pork swimming in a brow-mopping chilli sauce ($16) and cumin-spiced lamb spring rolls with a blitzed mint sauce with a hint of garlicky, fishy funkiness ($18).
Roasted meats are the main event here. There’s tan-skinned duck cleavered into fat slices to wrap in pancakes with hoisin and spring onion, excellent crackling-crusted pork belly and tasty, if dry, slices of char sui, all served with pickled ginger and green tomatoes if you choose the $70 Mya meat plate.
Bok choy in oyster sauce is expensive but tasty ($16).
While the XO sauce coating the bowl of pipis is dig-in delicious, the tooth-breakingly dry Chinese doughnuts failed on sopping duties ($39), and the ratio of oily doughnut to prawn was way out of whack to make this take on prawn toast better than the original ($18).
Drinks are by wine guy Matt Skinner who’s done a good job of corralling an eclectic bunch of grapes and regions into a cohesive cellar both upstairs and down, with bright aromatics leading the charge at Mya Tiger.
The off-dry Rieslingfreak No.5 at $65 proves a good friend to the chilli heat.
I’m not sure about setting tables with fortune cookies — it’s a bit upside down to start with the future — and prices for both food and booze up here warrant better than flimsy paper napkins and pre-poured wines.
Sure there are teething problems, but they are surprisingly few, and the overall vision couldn’t be clearer or more welcome.
The Espy is back. And it’s in great hands. These guys deserve an OAM for services to pubs.
HOTEL ESPLANADE
11 The Esplanade, St Kilda
9534 0211
Open: Daily from 11am
Go-to dish: Whole market fish with native lime
Score: 14/20