I found myself this evening in the comfortable green vinyl corner seat of the East Village Hotel in Darlinghurst. At 6pm on a Monday evening the place was largely deserted, although there was a trivia night (billed, in a tremendous show of optimism, as “The World’s Least S*** Pub Trivia”) advertised to start at 7.30pm so it could be assumed that the pace would pick up at some point.
Upon arrival, though, I found myself quite glad to sit quietly and sip some water having spent an hour or so wandering through the back streets of Sydney trying, for future reference, to find a miracle – a clean and friendly coffee shop with a lounge chair rather than those horrible plastic-and-metal numbers which stick to you when the weather is hot, and the whole sufficiently out of the way to be quiet and peaceful. The miracle didn’t eventuate (no surprises there), but I did manage to get lost, which I think is always rather pleasant, provided you are not late for anything.
Back to the pub, however. The East Village Hotel is a pleasantly quirky take on your average local. Someone obviously has Aspirations for it – they have good quality wine glasses, a killer menu and candles and fresh flowers on the dining tables – but for the rest it’s just the right amount of crap, with the ceiling a patchwork of the original plaster, bits of wood clumsily tacked on to repair holes but at least painted to match the original plaster, and bits of wood just clumsily tacked on, the bar (plywood covered with laminate) pocked here and there with holes, a lavatory that felt like it stepped straight out of the 70s… no, scratch that, it was worn and tatty enough to have weathered the intervening decades in a manner that could scarcely be described as graceful, and inside and out the walls of the hotel at large are tiled up to eye level in a style that always makes me think of a public toilet.
Somehow though the place’s combination of Aspiration and crap turns out to be rather charming and I find myself liking it and feeling immediately comfortable there.
When my company at last arrived we eventually decided to forgo the delights of the trivia night - after spending some time arguing ferociously about which out of the five of us was the most rubbish at trivia nights, we concluded that five people who would inevitably end up competing to be the most rubbish at the World’s Least S*** Pub Trivia hardly sounded like the most exciting way of spending an evening. Instead we settled down to pizza and drinks at an outside table where good conversation and the day’s slow fade into twilight provided all the entertainment necessary. By this time I had fallen rather heavily for the East Village and I fancy I may need to drop past it now and then on the way home from the office for a quiet drink and to mull over the events of the day…