Moon Under Water, George Orwell, Evening Standard, February 1946 George Orwell: My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights. Moon Under Water, Andrew McConnell, Gertrude St, July 2012 Tomatom: First, the public house is called the Builders Arms and it is also close to the tram stop on Gertrude St. The entrance to the casualy dumbed down fine dining restaurant The Moon Under Water is just around the corner, barely off Gertrude St, on Gore Street. With a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre up the street opposite Andrew McConnell’s other restaurant Cutler & Co, you are guaranteed a bit of edge on the street, if not a few metres around the corner. Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of “regulars” who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer. Its regular clientele has swapped from the impoverished and the grungy to cashed-up and smart. The Builders’ Arms restaurant is booked out weeks ahead. At $75 a head for four courses, a regular chair (for the Wednesday to Sunday that it is open) is a dream for most. And with the frequency that the menu changes, gourgeous though the food is, one visit a week is adequate. If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its “atmosphere.” You wouldn’t describe the beer coming first at The Moon Under Water. It’s the delightfully light yet flavoursome food of Andrew McConnell, followed by wine. The atmospehere is white. The interior is starkly white, another design from Projects of The Imagination. The clientelle is white apart from, one black, two Indians and four Asians the night we visited. Can I mention the food again? To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull’s head over the mantelpiece —everything has… Read more »