Payneham Tavern

A quick meal after a busy day! Such a quiet night at the tavern tonight — only 3 tables of diners at. 6,30 when I was there. The lamb salad special at $ 19.90 was delicious and an extremely generous serving. A mountain of moist and juicy slow cooked lamb topped a rocket with thinly sliced cucumber and feta salad was topped with yoghurt and garnished with lime. Spiced and toasted pita bread was placed as an accompaniment. I would most certainly choose this again.

A lovely little Tavern this one is located on Payneham Road. I’ve been here a few times to take advantage of a savvy night out on a weeknight.
If you pick your nights here you can grab a great value for money meal. I’ve been on Tuesday and Wednesday nights where they have schnitzel specials on Tuesdays and steak specials the next night. They also offer you the choice of chips or mash potato with your meals, which seems to be a rarity. Then they have a selective salad bar to nibble at before or during your meal, which was amazing. There were such things as a vegetable bake, potato salad, rice salad, coleslaw, roasted vegetables. I’m sure they alternate the options for different nights.
The meals were really good. For what you pay I feel it is decent. The serving sizes aren’t huge, but along side the salad bar I still walked away feeling very satisfied. My steak was cooked to perfection. I order a rare and it was delicious. They also don’t seem to take long at all to run your meals out. There were quite a few people in the cue to order when I did, yet still there wasn’t much a wait for meals. I’ve actually asked them to hold off starting our meals as we wanted to enjoy some of the salad bar first before our meals.
I absolutely wouldn’t rule out coming back here on a regular basis, particularly with a friend for an easy catch up dinner on a weeknight perhaps. The ambience is very relaxed and not at all noisy, even when half the dining room is full, and everything is very easily accessible.

Everyone has a local, and this was mine for the start of my drinking life. The Payneham Tavern has changed a lot from those innocent days of being ID’d and trying to find Holy Grail on the Juke Box. A new, fancy building (bit old now) including a Sports Bar, Restaurant area and expansive ‘pay to see flashing lights’ zone (pokies) has seen the Payneham Tavern become one of the more sizeable pubs in the area, and currently seems to attract the elderly crowd keen for a flutter.
The menu has changed a few times with a stint as a Steak House being the most notable. Currently they have a pretty standard pub menu and it can be ok, but it can also fall very short of the mark. I have had probably the worst Nachos in the world there (how the hell can you arse up Nachos?) and some very good Snittys and Steak within the same fortnight! Go figure!
The sports bar out the back is my favourite area, with a table tennis table, pool table, lounges and a couple of plasmas which make it a great spot to watch the Footer (A bit of a UK moment there).

All I can really say about the Payneham Tavern is… become a member! It’s free and if you do you not only get monthly member shows, you also get weekly meal specials which include a $ 7 300g rump steak on Wednesdays. Yes, that’s right, $ 7. Extremely worth it! It’s a nice place, the Payneham Tavern, with a really spacious bistro area which includes a comfortable couch area.