Alfred Hotel

The Alfred is a Camperdown art deco pub that started life in 1861 as the Grose Farm Hotel and picked up its current name in the 1980s. The operation has expanded since: a bar and bistro with twenty rotating craft beers on the horseshoe-shaped bar, a coffee-and-breakfast café opening at 5:30am for the RPA hospital shift-change crowd, a bottleshop and boutique rooms upstairs. The food leans into elevated pub classics; the programming covers trivia, live music and the expected big-screen sport. A renovated beer garden handles most of the warmer-weather traffic.

Dogs are welcome inside and out — explicitly stated on the venue's own site — which is a clearer policy than most inner-city pubs bother to publish. It's the sort of local that pulls students, shift workers and long-termers through the door in equal measure.