Three years ago, the 89-year-old General Gordon Hotel caught fire, ruining the locals' drinking hole in one wintry afternoon. More than 70 fire officers worked to save her as the roof collapsed, the awnings crashed down and the art deco pub's interior burnt almost entirely away. 

Locals stood and watched the beloved "Pride of Sydenham" fall in on herself. For months, the General Gordon, named after a philanthropic British military hero, immortalised in a 1966 war epic starring Charlton Heston and Lawrence Olivier, was boarded up. Her exterior walls clung on with support braces and barricades, but she looked perilously like a demolition candidate.

But the GG is a fighter. In March, after a nine-month restoration, the pub designed by the original architect of the Lansdowne, the Old Clare and the Light Brigade hotels, Sidney Warden, came back.

Her insides are dapper now, sunlit and airy. New yellow tiles, freshly made and exported from England, glow on the rebuilt exterior walls. There's a new roof and eight swanky jewel-toned hotel rooms on the first floor. You can choose to sit on a minty blue and green tartan-shod chair near palms and Venetian glass bricks or below a glass-roofed terrace near plants and art deco lights at lovely wood tables.

In a booth overlooked by giant wall murals of millennials dealing with a breeze, we're wrangling a wide-ranging menu designed by head chef Kirsten Baker from Vic on the Park.

Dishes range from pub classics to Mediterranean and Middle East-style dishes including chermoula chicken, vegan burgers, hand-stretched pizzas and 300-gram grass-fed sirloin on fried gorgonzola polenta. The chips are also excellent.

Our food arrives after a bit of a wait. Possibly because wood roasted pumpkin is a fully baked winter squash filled with maple and lime quinoa, green beans, coconut flakes, almonds, black beans, broccoli and coriander. It is the Mount Vesuvius of baked vegetables, spilling its nutty, citrusy and sweetly fragrant stuffing onto a ring of beetroot jam. It is big and very good.

The pistachio-crusted barramundi, fat on a bed of sweet potato fondant, cauliflower puree, broccolini, nuts, seeds and hazelnut dressing, is plump and fresh. Its sturdy crust is more unyielding, possibly because it waited for an entire pumpkin to bake. 

The mixed berry tart, a folded pastry parcel of rich blood red fruit, with vanilla bean ice-cream and toasted coconut flakes, is tangily sweet and luscious. The star is a serving of New York's most famous chocolate chip cookie, created after the award-winning New York Levain Bakery's biscuit. Please go to the General Gordon now to eat this hefty, gooey baked good served with vanilla ice-cream. Your health will not benefit but it is heaven in a dessert bowl.

Judging by the mix of family groups, youthful types and longtime beer-sippers watching the world go by, the GG will satisfy locals and unpretentious crosstown-trippers alike. Live DJs play on Friday and weekend evenings and there is nothing more urban than taking in the front bar's view and soundscape of thundering planes, cars and nearby trains over a beer.

And history is not forgotten. The hotel's long line of female licensees continues with Sarah Lewis at the helm, overseeing bar counters fronted with charred wood and big black-and-white photos documenting the day the GG stood broken and melted by fire. May she march on solidly into the future.

The low-down

General Gordon Hotel 

Main attraction: A sun-filled, smart and respectful restoration of the 89-year-old "Pride of Sydenham" after its fire in 2018. 

Must-try dish: New York's most famous chocolate chip cookie – vast, warm and pooled in melted chocolate and vanilla ice-cream.

Insta-worthy dish: 12-hour beef short rib with mushroom and shallot spaetzle for its heft, or wood-roasted pumpkin for its Mount Vesuvius-like bounty.