Town Hall Hotel: Fitzroy

Sean Donovan has taken over the Town Hall Hotel Enter the meat... By Larissa Dubecki

Harry Lilai selling the Town Hall Hotel to Sean Donovan was a bit like the passing of the Olympic torch from one champ to another. Lilai sails off into the sunset with the neighbourhood goodwill borne of five years of Italian excellence, while Donovan – the chef who turned around Footscray’s Station Hotel and South Melbourne’s Wayside Inn and has proven he knows his way around a pub – has arrived in Fitzroy packing meat. Thematically the place is classic Donovan; stylistically it’s a bit of a triumph, with the old girl treated to a much-needed makeover. It would have cost a pretty penny – from the gardenish conservatory with its mosaic tiles, bagged walls and plenty of things that photosynthesise, to the sophisticated velvet blue of the dining room proper, with the hunting-lodge touch of tartan lampshades. Steak aside, there’s good stuff coming off the redgumfired grill here. Humungous tiger prawns, cooked to that alluring state where the flesh is still gelatinous and the heads totally suckable, buried beneath a sweet vinegar-dressed avalanche of cherry tomatoes, baby capers, lemon zest and herbs. Or whole buttery flounder, the flesh coming away in big pearly flakes, the dark skin its own realm of delight. Steaks range from a 180g flatiron at $24 to a mighty 1.2 kilo O’connor dry-aged T-bone at $140. In between there’s the likes of the grass-fed rump cap, with Donovan’s textbook yolk-yellow, tarragon-driven béarnaise riding shotgun. Springy, rather sinewy, it’s good without being great. And the other components of an excellent food pub: a decent kids’ menu, good staff, and a smart wine list (the full bodied, dry and floral Louis Max Mâcon Villages chardonnay is a good choice to go from bivalve to bovine). In a way the Donovan takeover is another chapter of the same book. The king is dead, long live the king.