The pub classic is a funny thing. It pretends to be fixed in amber - a chicken schnitty the size of a hubcap, a pav that wobbles like a proud nanna, a parma that arrives on a slab of plate with chips spilling like loose change.
Anyone who’s ever eaten their way across Australia knows the truth: ‘classic’ here has always meant ‘borrowed’, then loved hard enough to feel like ours. The future of pub food is just the next verse in that old, hungry song.
Walk into a good local on a Winter Friday and you can smell the past first. Hot oil, peppery gravy, the sweet singe of a flat-top. There’s comfort in that, in the way a schnitty announces itself before you even see it.
Yet listen closer - past the clink of glasses and the thud of footy on a muted TV - and you’ll hear the new language forming. It sounds like lemongrass being bruised under a Chef’s palm. Like gochujang hitting butter in a pan. Like a pestle tapping cumin, then coriander, then dried lime. The classics are being rewritten and you can taste the edits.
Take the schnitty, that golden badge of pub virtue. It came to us by way of European kitchens and postwar migration, then settled into Aussie life like a well-worn flanno. Now Chefs are letting it roam. You might find it Panko-crusted instead of breadcrumbed, audibly crackling under your knife. It arrives with a slick of miso gravy that tastes like roast chicken’s wiser cousin, or with a bright, fiery sambal instead of plain old lemon.
Some pubs are swapping chicken for eggplant marinated in soy and smoke, making a vegetarian schnitty that doesn’t plead forgiveness for being itself. The heart of it remains the same - crisp, tender, generous - but the accent has changed.
Then there’s the parma, our great communal argument. Somewhere between nostalgia and theatre, it’s a dish built for the centre of the table even when it’s ordered solo. Chefs aren’t trying to replace it so much as stretch it.
Smoked mozzarella in place of the usual melt. Sujuk tucked under the Napoli. A pineapple pickle that nods to the old ‘Hawaiian’ debates while gently trolling them. These plates don’t sneer at tradition; they wink at it, then invite it out dancing.
As for sweet? Australia’s dessert national anthem is the pavlova - a cloud of meringue, the crunch giving way to marshmallow, fruit piled high like Summer at its brightest. The modern pav is less about shrinking the dream and more about widening the map.
Think passionfruit still, yes, but also mango and sticky black rice, or a crown of macerated lychees and rose. Some Chefs scatter toasted coconut and lime zest over the top so the whole thing smells like a beach holiday in another hemisphere. The pavlova’s magic has always been contrast - crisp and soft, sweet and sharp - and that idea welcomes new companions.
What’s changing in pubs isn’t just flavour. It’s confidence. For years, ‘pub food’ meant a kind of defensive simplicity: big serves, familiar shapes, no surprises. Now it’s becoming a portrait of who we are when we’re not trying to explain ourselves.
Australia is multicultural in a daily, lived way and the kitchen is one of the quickest places for that reality to show up. Chefs with Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Pacific Islander and First Nations roots aren’t ‘adding a twist’” They’re cooking from their centre, letting the classics meet them there.
The best versions feel inevitable, like the dish was always waiting to become this. A schnitty that’s still a schnitty, just with the brightness of ginger and the slow heat of chilli woven through it. A pavlova that still makes you sigh at first bite, now perfumed with cardamom or crowned with tamarind-slicked berries. Food that respects the pub’s job - to feed you well, to make you feel held - while refusing to pretend Australia is a single story.
The future of pub food isn’t a break-up with the classics. It’s a remix at full volume. Same chorus, richer harmony. The comfort’s still there. It just comes with more colour in the light, more passports in the pantry and a sense that the pub table is big enough for all of us.
