[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 h...