Prince Alfred Hotel, 355 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, 9646 6006
entree $8-$14, mains $15.50-$19.50, desserts $8
AE BC MC Visa Eftpos
Mon-Fri midday-3pm, Mon-Sat 6-10pm, Sun 5-9.30pm
Fully licensed
It's about this time of the year, when the wind starts to bite and a chilled glass of rose starts to lose its attraction, that my thoughts turn to the pub. But not one of those shiny, modern places that looks like it's stepped from the pages of a fashion mag, all dolled up with groovy light fittings and elegant, organically shaped banquettes in suedette.
No, I'm thinking of a real pub with a wide, high bar for leaning on, a footy tipping comp and perhaps a couple of pool tables, the green baize faded from a thousand doubles into the centre pocket. During the week it might be quiet, but when the pay packet arrives it's good if there's a dodgy local band or a DJ to distract the rest of the hotel from your antics.
It is nice, too, if there is a veneer of permanence, a sense of history. Perhaps a Weg caricature on one wall and a picture of the pub's footy team on another. This should be from a time back when blokes wore trilby hats and flat caps and had the required wing-nut ears to hold them up.
And finally, it would probably have a name that tells you it's been here since the days of horses rather than horsepower. Something like the Prince Alfred.
It should also have regulars keen enough on its success to bombard someone like me with emails singing its praises in the sort of orchestrated campaign usually reserved for elections.
There should be a suitable range of CUB and Tooheys beers - and some quaffable bottles of red, like the T'Gallant pinot, Dalwhinnie Cabernet and Cravens Heathcote shiraz, that'll see off the winter chill. And decent bar staff who aren't worried about where their Equity card is coming from would be another plus.
There's not much else I want, other than enough space to stand around the pool tables and enough tables so you can sit and eat from a menu that costs less than the 20 gaspers you'll smoke before you go home.
This menu should be hearty, unthreatening and the perfect match to a night celebrating the brewer's art. Spring rolls, burgers, steak sangas, bangers and mash, fish and chips, wedges with sour cream, perhaps dips and definitely a fat slab of cakey sticky date pudding with lashings of cream and butterscotch sauce.
There obviously needs to be a parma - maybe a chook one with cheese and napoli sauce or a veal one with a crumb crust dark from a fryer that's obviously seeing some action.
And then something for the chardonnay drinkers, like ribbons of lemon-peppered, battered calamari on a big mound of dressed leaves.
If you were very lucky - and lived in Port Melbourne - it might even be your local pub.