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The Best Pubs in Melbourne CBD for a Bevvy and a Bite
Need a knockoff? Treat yourself to a pint and parma at one of the best pubs in Melbourne CBD.
Melbourne CBD has rediscovered the pleasure of the pub. The doors are open, rooftops are filling up and the first round after work has developed a natural habit of becoming dinner. Old corner hotels are pouring pints beneath heritage ceilings, enormous new venues are appearing beside train stations, and some of the city’s best kitchens are now attached to bars where nobody minds if you only came in for a beer.
There is still plenty of parma-and-pot territory, naturally. But the modern Melbourne pub can also mean oysters and retail-priced wine, Sunday roast beneath an atrium, comedy downstairs, a rooftop overlooking Parliament or Guinness beside a live Irish band. The greatest ones understand something wonderfully uncomplicated: sometimes you want a restaurant reservation; sometimes you want to walk through an open door, find a table outside and see what happens.
These are the best pubs in Melbourne CBD for doing exactly that.
Good Nature Hotel
Federation Square has always been excellent at attracting crowds and rather less reliable at giving them somewhere appealing to meet. Good Nature Hotel fixes that. The former Beer Deluxe has been recast with native greenery, a weather-protected beer garden, an airy atrium and the upstairs Grove Bar & Terrace, complete with a playground. Pub classics, grills, spritzes and local beer cover the table, while the location makes it incredibly easy to turn pre-game drinks into the whole afternoon.
Federation Square, Flinders Street, Melbourne
Garden State Hotel
Long before Garden State Hotel filled Flinders Lane with ficus trees and Friday-afternoon drinkers, this address was Rosati, the wildly fashionable 1980s warehouse restaurant that reportedly poured more Moët than anywhere else in Australia and appeared in Kylie Minogue’s Got to Be Certain video. Today, the scale remains part of the appeal: more than 800 people fit across the pub, with a tiered indoor beer garden at its centre, a basement Rose Garden for cocktails and Tippy-Tay handling the Italian side of things. A lot of Melbourne nightlife has passed through this building. It seems in no hurry to stop.
101 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
The Oxford Scholar
The people have spoken, and their favourite pub sits right on Swanston Street. The Oxford Scholar took out the People’s Choice Award at the 2026 AHA (Vic) State Awards for Excellence, beating more than 150 pubs to the public-voted title. A gold-rush-era Melbourne name with a fresh city-campus life, it moves easily from parmas and trivia to Sunday roast, after-work pints and three-storey Friday nights.
427 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Waterside Hotel
On the corner of Flinders and King, The Waterside Hotel still wears its 1925 cream-brick façade, but almost everything behind it is new. Sand Hill Road’s rebuild rises through seven levels of concrete, glass and mid-century colour, from the public bar and beer garden to Sarah Chan’s Past / Port and an open-air rooftop above the city. Chan’s cooking moves through Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia: raw kingfish with salted plum and Thai basil, tom yum prawn dumplings in spicy coconut, beef rendang with Angus brisket and, at lunch, her deeply personal Sarawak laksa with chicken and king prawns in a fragrant coconut broth. A pub built for an afternoon with several acts.
508 Flinders Street, Melbourne
Le Pub
Le Pub understands that the pub never needed improving so much as remembering what made it good. On a Little Bourke Street site that poured drinks as Kirk’s Bazaar Hotel in the 1800s, Con Christopoulos and Joshua Brisbane have returned to counter meals, handwritten menus and wine chosen straight from the wall. The cooking wanders happily through Britain and France, from bone marrow and snails to calf’s liver, potato cakes and excellent bread-and-butter pudding. Bottles come at retail price plus corkage; Guinness and local beer handle the taps.
Nothing here asks you to make an occasion of it. Which is precisely how three hours disappear.
380 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne
Hickens Hotel
Hickens Hotel has reclaimed a name first used on this Russell Street corner in the 1870s, when boxer and publican Abe Hicken staged bouts upstairs for packed Melbourne crowds. Today the four-level pub keeps the sporting streak alive with Abe’s Athletic Hall, home to arcade games, karaoke rooms and wall-to-wall screens, while the Carlton Lounge pours tank-fresh Carlton Draught below. Upstairs, the rooftop opens to the city and the menu runs from Cheese & Vegemite garlic bread to hearty pub pies and boozy bread-and-butter pudding.
127 Russell Street, Melbourne
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Quarterhouse
Quarterhouse is what happens when Southern Cross Station gets a pub big enough to absorb the entire post-work exodus. The three-level venue starts with parmas, steaks, a blue cheese-heavy burger and a four-metre screen downstairs, then opens out to a sunlit terrace and rooftop above. It is built for groups, long afternoons and the sort of Sunday roast that can reset an entire weekend.
Sitchu Tip: The Sunday roast is one of the best in the city.
693 Collins Street, Docklands
The Drunken Poet
Beside Queen Victoria Market, The Drunken Poet has built its reputation around a very simple formula: excellent Guinness, live music six nights a week and almost no interest in overcomplicating things. The walls nod to great Irish writers, the room stays dark and intimate, and the kitchen keeps to toasties rather than theatrics. It earns loyalty slowly, then keeps it for years.
65 Peel Street, West Melbourne
The Lincoln
The Lincoln has occupied the corner of Cardigan and Queensberry streets since 1854, with its current Art Deco bar dating to a 1939 overhaul. The terrazzo, open fireplace and old bar stools remain, but the kitchen has long since moved beyond standard counter meals. Right now that means wild venison and red wine pie, tiger prawn toast, twice-baked cheese soufflé with black truffle and a chicken schnitzel with herb butter. Twelve rotating craft taps and a tight wine list favouring smaller producers keep the drinking equally interesting.
On Sundays, the roast changes between pork, lamb and beef, with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and seasonal vegetables, and runs until sold out. Book accordingly.
91 Cardigan Street, Carlton
Morris House
Morris House rewards anyone willing to keep climbing. The Exhibition Street pub runs from a basement comedy club to a ground-floor dining room, a first-floor terrace with live music and, finally, an open-air rooftop above the city. Food stays comfortably in pub territory, with house-made focaccia, cured meats and share plates, while the roof gets DJs from Thursday through Sunday and cocktails including the enduring Iced VoVo Margarita. On Sundays, funk, soul and disco take over from late afternoon.
120 Exhibition Street, Melbourne
The Mitre Tavern
At Bank Place, The Mitre Tavern looks as though the skyscrapers grew around it and somebody forgot to move the pub. Melbourne’s oldest surviving building has been pouring drinks as the Mitre since 1868, its timbered rooms giving way to a 400-square-metre beer garden that comes into its own on a Friday afternoon. Upstairs, the steakhouse takes care of chargrilled beef; downstairs, 47 taps and the famous chicken parma keep matters pleasingly straightforward.
5 Bank Place, Melbourne
The Natural History Public Bar
At Natural History Public Bar, the taxidermy is not decorative filler. Its extraordinary 15-metre diorama was created by designer Michael Delany and artist Vanja Zaric, who built three imagined habitats around roughly 25 specimens, including a white peacock, Eurasian badger and chital deer. Red leather banquettes, chequered floors and diner-style details nod to old New York museums and bistros, while steaks, oysters, burgers and fish and chips keep proceedings firmly in pub territory. Wednesdays bring trivia, Thursdays live music, and selected bottles are half price on Mondays and Fridays.
401 Collins Street, Melbourne
The Sherlock Holmes
Some pubs borrow a British accent; The Sherlock Holmes Inn built Baker Street beneath Collins Street. Open since 1985, the low-beamed basement has 19 taps with Fuller’s London Pride, Hobgoblin Ruby, Old Speckled Hen, Kilkenny and Guinness among them. The kitchen keeps the fiction going with full-pastry Steak & Guinness pie, bangers and mash and Eccles cake with brandy custard. Upstairs, Dr Watson’s swaps the basement gloom for Collins Street windows and cocktails.
415 Collins Street, Melbourne
Captain Melville
Captain Melville lives within the bluestone Mac’s Hotel, built in 1853 when Melbourne was swelling with gold-rush traffic and once used as a coaching stop for travellers heading to the diggings. Its current name nods to Francis Melville, the so-called “Gentleman Bushranger”, whose rebel mythology also informed Breathe Architecture’s 2012 redesign. Downstairs, parmas, bangers and mash, curries and pub plates cover the early shift; upstairs, Loch & Key has its own bar, covered balcony and a licence stretching deep into the night.
34 Franklin Street, Melbourne
Imperial Hotel
Long before The Imperial Hotel became one of Melbourne’s great rooftop pubs, this Bourke Street corner hosted a circus, concerts and grand dances. By 1863 it had become Richardson’s Imperial Hotel, and the revelry has continued in various forms ever since. Today, original red cedar doors open onto a sports pub below, while upstairs the rooftop looks almost directly across to Parliament House, with cocktails, pub plates, live music and big games on screen. Few Melbourne history lessons come with a better view.
2-8 Bourke Street, Melbourne
The Mint
The Mint is one pub whose name requires no branding exercise. It occupies the North Gatehouse of the former Royal Melbourne Mint, the William Street complex that began striking coins in 1872. Today, one of the CBD’s largest beer gardens spreads beside those old walls, with Monday pies, Tuesday trivia, Wednesday porterhouse and happy hour running from 4.30pm to 6.30pm. There are worse places to spend your money than beside the building that once made it.
318 William Street, Melbourne
Saint & Rogue
The weekend can have the suburbs. Saint & Rogue belongs to the working city, opening Monday to Friday in an 1873 Little Collins Street building that has been a magistrate’s premises, print shop, leather factory and wine merchant along the way. Downstairs, the long oak bar and half-covered beer garden catch the after-work migration from Southern Cross; upstairs, the Loft rises beneath a cathedral ceiling more than a century old. Monday steak, a 4pm happy hour and a room that knows exactly what to do with 5.30pm.
582 Little Collins Street, Melbourne
The Duke of Wellington
Before Melbourne had laneways, rooftop bars or even much of a skyline, The Duke of Wellington was already pouring drinks on the corner of Flinders and Russell. The building dates to 1850 and has held a hotel licence since 1853, carrying it from gold-rush travellers and newspaper men to footy crowds heading towards the MCG. Downstairs, the public bar keeps faith with the classics, including a roast beef roll, beer-battered rockling and the cheeseburger; upstairs, Arthur’s handles cocktails before the rooftop opens towards the city.
Have the roast beef roll downstairs, then head upstairs with a drink and watch one of Melbourne’s oldest pub corners carry on around you.
146 Flinders Street, Melbourne
Worked your way through Melbourne CBD’s best pubs? Keep the night moving with our edit of the city’s best new restaurants, or call it and head home with one of Melbourne’s best takeaways and something sweet from the best dessert delivery spots.
