Helen Foster

Spring 2024 update: The warm weather is here, so it’s time to get outside for a coupla cold ones in a sunny beer garden with your mates. From mid-week feeds to trivia nights and live music, Sydney’s best pubs are sure to set the stage for good times. Below, you’ll find the ones well worth their salt. There's a lot that goes into making a great pub. They need to furnish you with an excellent meal and friendly service, and a game of pool or darts doesn't go astray. On a sunny day, it's all about having a welcoming beer garden, and on a Sunday, it's all about a cracking roast. There are a lot of rock-solid pubs in this city, and these are our picks of the bunch, pulled together by Time Out Sydney critics including Food & Drink Editor Avril Treasure. Cheers! Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out Sydney newsletter for more news, food & drink inspo and activity ideas, straight to your inbox. For something a bit less pubby, a bit higher end, see our picks of the best bars in Sydney. Hungry? Check out our ultimate guide to Sydney's best restaurants. 

Fancy visiting a pub with a beautiful sun-kissed balcony, $12 happy hour Aperol Spritzes, no pokies – and even a seriously good Scotch Egg on the menu? That's what you'll find at the Village Inn pub in Paddington, at least for now. It's one of the community's favourite pubs, which is why a new development application proposing the historic pub be turned into a clothing shop has got the locals fired up. Located at the Oxford Street end of Glenmore Road, the Village Inn first became a pub sometime around 1888, meaning it's possibly Paddington’s oldest watering hole.  Walk in and, depending on the day of the week, you might find couples on dates, groups of mums on a night out, Swans fans congregating before a game, and a large number of cute dogs looking longingly at anyone eating the pie. It’s a pub where you really do feel like any age or demographic is welcome. Despite this, the development application that's putting the pub under threat states that ‘the original use and purpose of the building as a hotel has become redundant as Paddington has moved from a working-class suburb’. The application proposes to turn the pub into a store for fashion brand Alemais on the ground floor, and office space above.  Local residents are horrified at the idea of losing the pub – and the reasoning behind it. "We reject the unsupported argument in the Weir Phillips Heritage submission that suggests the hotel is redundant because Paddington is no longer a working-class area," says local residen