Last week some colleagues and I went to the Kew hotel for lunch. We’d been to the Skinny Dog hotel the week before (when I had forgotten my camera) and had enjoyed the good but quite expensive pub food there. In comparison, the Kew hotel has an older and less appealing interior but lower prices, though it’s not the cheapest pub meal around. At my first visit to the Skinny Dog I had very good fish and chips ($25) and, as it is my preference to order a standard or classic dish when visiting a pub for the first time to see how they do it, I ordered a basic chicken parma at the Kew ($20.50, below).

The parma is large and the meat is tender, the sauce is flavoursome without being too salty, and the best bit is the three cheese mix on top. It’s probably the best cheese I’ve ever had on a parma. The chips are reasonable and the salad was basic and fresh. An extra $2.50 gives you a variety of gourmet parmas including sauteed mushroom, which one of my colleagues ordered and declared to be very good (below).

The other orders at our table included the steak burger served on Turkish bread (below) and the plump and precariously stacked beef burger (bottom), which was declared to be delicious. The Kew hotel may not be the most charismatic pub in the inner east of Melbourne, but it delivers generous serves of reliable pub food without pretension, and that means I am likely to return.

If you’re lucky you may also see the dancing man outside on the corner of Kew junction. Disclosure: this meal was paid for by my employer.