By Sacha Delfosse
Drink & Dine, the team that refreshed and revamped The Flinders Hotel, The Norfolk Hotel, The Carrington Hotel and The Abercrombie will open the doors to their latest Sydney pub project, The Forresters, this Friday.
In a short period of time, Drink & Dine has made a name for itself as one of Sydney's most exciting young pub groups.
Like the company’s other venues, The Forresters will focus on offering good food and drinks in a relaxed atmosphere, this time with an Italian feel, featuring pizzas, pastas, salads and snacks.
"The food menu is Italian influenced but not strictly traditional. There is a lot to the menu but the main focus is on pizzas," co-owner James Wirth said.
"We will also do a different type of meat on the rotisserie everyday – Monday is lamb, Tuesday is beef, Wednesday is chicken, Thursday is goat etc."
The cocktail menu was developed by Luke Ashton and is "loosely Italian based", Wirth said, built around Italian liqueurs but not served in a traditional way.
"We are using lots of Italian left of centre kind of products combined with pretty unusual combinations of spirits, things like Amaretto and Jack Daniels."
The pub itself has been completely transformed over a three-month period with Wirth and the team getting their hands dirty knocking down walls, painting the rooms and "redecorating and re-tweaking the place".
Some of the new additions to the pub include two new bars, a 60-seater restaurant upstairs, a pizzeria-style diner downstairs, a vegetable garden and a karaoke function room.
The design of the downstairs rooms features tiled tables, timber panel walls, heavy rusted metal chandeliers, straw matting on the roofs along with random artworks.
"Upstairs is much the same but with upholstered seating and concrete walls and our designer also created a 15ft chandelier made from Chianti bottles and fake grapes," Wirth says.
The Forresters is located at 336 Riley St, Surry Hills and is open seven days a week for lunch and dinner.