Pegleg, Sydney’s Colonial Rum, and Gin Bar

[00:40] Hi, it's Cullen here from EATT Magazine. I'm here in Sydney's Colonial Rum and Gin Bar, Peg leg Pyrmont which I have recently stumbled across. I'm next to Collin Perillo. Thanks, Collin for joining us. Now, can I just ask you, how did you come up with this nautically inspired space? Collin at Pegleg Sydney's Rum and Gin Bar I mean to me, it's not tiki, it's much more than that. I felt like I was stepping on board a ship. I thought like I was arriving somewhere, like stepping into another reality. [01:19] Wow. Well, that's a brilliant description Cullen because you've put it in more eloquent words than what we set to achieve. I'm happy that you used the word Tiki there because Manuel and I do come from a Tiki bartending background which we were both quite passionate about. But with Pegleg, we chose to do something a little bit different, whereas Tiki was mostly inspired by the postwar experience of most Americans who were in the South Pacific, who brought back a little bit of South Pacific Polynesian Culture and then Americanized the hell out of it by making it fluorescent colors and templated all over California and Hawaii. What we chose to do with this building, when we found out what it was and what its historical value was to Australian booze culture, what we decided to do was come up with our own version of Tiki, which we affectionately called Oz Tiki. [02:18] That's fundamentally how Pegleg begins. When Manuel and I, got the lease for this building. We found out that it was the oldest pub in Pyrmont. A 159-year-old pub in a country that's a little over 200 years old with Europeans buildings over here. When we started looking at that, we did a little bit of math, and we figured out Captain Cook had arrived 80 years before this building and the first fleet's had started arriving in this island, 50 years before this building was constructed. Then we started looking into a little bit of Australian history, we knew from there and started thinking about, okay, so what do we know about Pyrmont? Well, what was Pyrmont in the earliest days? This peninsula, surprisingly was the quarry where the convicts that we all learned about in our history books were sent to cut rocks, to build the suburb in the CBD of Sydney, which is famously called The Rocks. Well, those rocks came from the sandstone that's just below us and one of the longest roads, probably, the first road longer than two miles built on this island by Europeans would have been the road going from the rocks to the quarry. And that would be to carry the rocks to build the stone roads from here Oyster shells among the bottles add to the unique look and feel of the Pegleg bar [03:48] Exactly. And so when we, when we found that out, that was the little starting point of this suburb and where it comes from and we started thinking of ourselves, so what would this pub have been like when, it was brand new, and we looked around, and we said, well, it's a very British looking pub to my and Manuel's eyes, both of us having lived in London. We also trained in London for the better part of a decade and then moved to Australia to try our hand at opening bars here. We looked at this beautiful old English pub as we recognised it and went, oh, this place, sure looks like it was built by a bunch of Englishman and Irishman who probably just arrived here from over there and built what they were familiar with back home. Well, we love English pubs and Irish pubs. [04:35] We decided to roll with that. But instead of making an English or an Irish pub, which is a little bit contrived in my opinion, we decided to do something unapologetically Australian because as foreigners living in London, but loving all that cool British stuff that they have in London, like fish and chips, meat pies, you know, Sunday roast, all that kind of stuff. Both of us having arrived in Australia found that Aussies find those things to be very heritage Australian foods and dishes and part of our culture here as well, but just quietly between you and me, because we have better ingredients and a lot of other good things going for us in this country, I found that we do a lot of those things, a heck of a lot better here in Australia than we do than we did in the UK. Manuel and I decided to take all of that completely onboard and do all of these heritage focused foods, meat pies, Sunday roasts, fish and chips, fresh oysters, and then keep going further and further down the pathway of what makes Australia, unique and awesome. Well, we have some of the best seafood in the world in this country. Also, just a stone's throw down the hill from our location here in Pyrmont is one of the greatest seafood markets in the world and one of the best ones in our continent, the Sydney Seafood Market. And is it true you get your seafood delivered fresh from only a few meters away? [06:04] Mostly true, if we include in the delivery process, the fact that our head chef does the carrying of the delivery. Our head chef, whose name is John, who's an absolute legend, walks down that hill at the beginning of his shift and picks out what fish he wants and the oysters he is going to be serving that day. Everything is virtually as fresh as it could be lest we fished at ourselves. And I don't like waking up early in the morning, so I'm not fishing. But on the other hand, John does a great job picking out amazing products and one of the things we decided to do, is focus on things that we in this city have that makes it a great place. You know, not everybody in the world is lucky enough to have amazing seafood dropped off within walking distance in the middle of a major city where we can also have great chefs like John, cook it up for us. [07:02] Manuel and I were very inspired by some Cornish friends, friends from Cornwall in Britain who took a lot of pride in their British heritage food and a lot of their connection to the food was the fact that they often knew the fishermen who caught the fish and their local pub and a local brewer would be making the real ale that they would both be drinking and battering their fish and chips with. And so what we started thinking about was the finest quality of those foods, and what they often are. It often comes down to the quality and ingredients, and we have access to the best ingredients in the world here. So if we use them and we get the temperatures right, and we work with really passionate and competent chefs who can get all those kind of details right, we can't produce bad food. We have to get some of the best quality versions of these dishes that we all love coming out of our bar and a restaurant. [07:59] Yeah and I noticed that there's a very Australian feel to have a good Australian beer menu. You've also got a good selection of Australian wines, is that true [08:17] That's a great observation. We tried to focus on showing off what is great that we make on in this country and we also have a lot of love for New Zealand. [08:31] Yeah, let's talk about New Zealand though, because I think I've got some on my hand right now and it's extraordinary rum. [08:38] So when we first met, and you happened to notice that we have a very strong rum showing, that's for a bunch of reasons. One of the reasons is that, as you may know, the first currency in this country was actually rum. There's a little bit of fun history connected with Pyrmont. The Peninsula Pyrmont at one point in early Australian history before we adopted the pound, the peninsula itself was purchased for a gallon of rum, as the story goes, there's actually a pub down the street called Gallon in honor of that story. And we joke every time we pay a bill with someone that we accept, both of Australian currencies, the Australian dollar and Rum. [09:27] Also, I know that you know that you've got some great cocktails here and I guess my sense is, before I walked in here, the whole entrance way through the window, I feel like I am much closer to the ocean than I am. [10:01] Well, thanks very much for noticing that. When we looked at the history of this neighbourhood and the building itself, we found out that Darling harbour was effectively what Ellis Island is to Americans, but for European immigrants who came to Australia and specifically New South Wales. [10:21] Do you want to explain to our listeners who might not know what Ellis Island is? [10:28] Gladly. So Ellis island is the island in New York, near Manhattan, where most European immigrants for a period of early European immigration to North America would have come via Ellis island because that's where immigration was controlled. That's where they were processed, right? [10:45] Exactly. And here in Darling Harbor, we have something called the welcome wall because that's, which is just immediately next to the National Maritime Museum and this is in commemoration of the fact that that was our immigration point for Europeans coming to New South Wales. So we wanted to learn everything we could and then as we came up with this fun new idea, which is Oz Tiki, we kept going and going with it because it's actually quite relevant to this neighborhood and the building. So, the Ellis Island of Australia, the immigration port, which is Darling Harbor for well over 100 years is literally 100 meters from here. This being the oldest pub in Pyrmont, what we came to realize is that many of the very first European immigrants to this island might've gotten off that boat, sign their papers, and then thought to themselves, I've just been on a boat for three months at sea. I can do with a beer. [12:06] And we would have been the nearest pub to that port. Now there are pubs older than us, in the rocks. The rocks are two miles, hike up a hill, just trying to put myself in the shoes of somebody who just got off a boat three months at sea.

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Pegleg, Sydney’s Colonial Rum, and Gin Bar is an episode from EATT Magazine podcast by EATT Magazine podcast.

This episode is 31:28 long.

This episode was published on Dec 31, 2018.

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