Words, Sally Young 

I’m the kind of the person who feels that there are so many things that have to be planned that I try to leave the rest as unplanned as possible. I like to be able to come home from work, think about going to the gym, decide to open a bottle of wine instead, sit out the back, relax, have a few drinks and then, just before I start to slur a bit, head out for something to eat, so I can have a few more wines and pay $30 for a bit of lettuce and a couple of prawns. Natural right? I’m young (enough) and although I have recently succumbed to buying a house in the suburbs of Perth, I don’t believe that that has to be synonymous with a kind of social death or fast track to middle age. I enjoy my lack of responsibility on weekends. I like the fact that I can stay out all night if I want to and don’t have to rush home to feed the cat, the dog or the kids. I want to foster that feeling of being hippyish and spontaneous. Unfortunately the restaurant opening hours in Perth are seriously cramping my style.

I decided to go to a local restaurant recently with my partner. As we fluffed about at home I glanced at the clock and remarked that we’d better be quick as the kitchen might be closing soon. This would have been sometime around the ungodly late hour of maybe 8.15. By the time we got there, and it was literally across the road, the very nice waitress informed us that we would have about five minutes to place an order as the kitchen was closing. It wasn’t even dark outside. I sat there, scanning the (to be fair mostly grey) heads of other diners thinking, “What’s going on?” The sun is literally setting as the LAST orders are being taken. Now, I know a lot of Perthies were anti, though a little inactive about the whole daylight saving thing but the fact is, it’s here and it should surely prompt a little flexibility with restaurant opening hours,  particularly during summer. For someone who clearly remembers standing, forehead pressed against my bedroom window on the one beautiful Scottish summer night of the year and bemoaning the fact that I had to go to bed while Gary next door got to ride his bike at 9.30 at night, I find this all the more insulting. I’m grown up now. I have no kids to cram into bed in broad daylight or dairy cows to see to and am in the small percentage of people who kind of likes the stretched out relaxed feeling of summer days that last forever.  But what is the point when you find you have to flap around to get out for dinner by 9.00 or face the fate of rifling through the dodgy takeaway menus in the third drawer in the kitchen and settling for pizza...again.

I realise that this isn’t the experience of all Perthies. My dad, for one, who just turned 64, is in that band of diners who is at a restaurant on the dot at 6.30, bottle of Bin 555 tucked under his arm, ready to order as the waitress approaches the table and quite happy to round up the conversation quickly so he gets home and is tucked up in bed by 9.30. And that’s fine for him, but he spent his 20’s and 30’s being able to go and get bevvied at the pub in London or Glasgow and head out for a slap up Chicken Tikka Masaala at midnight.  That seems an unbelievable luxury coming from the present situation in Perth. 

The following weekend I decided to try what seemed like a larger restaurant, after all it was in our (dorks’ bible) Entertainment book. We spent half the night circling a huge shopping complex trying to find the damn place while my partner bitched that he doesn’t want to eat overlooking a car park anyway. When we finally got there at 8.55, we were told we needed to order quickly as the restaurant would be closing in exactly an hour, so, knowing my partner’s affinity for long, reflective pauses amidst the menu scanning, I suggested we go for the buffet. Oh, except that it was going to be going soon as well, so we would be given a gracious discount of 10% if we took everything we were going to eat in pretty much one hit. We spent the next five minutes, madly piling pakora and multi coloured curries onto about five plates. Now, a buffet is not an intimate dining experience anyway, but with the music being turned off, the last of the diners preparing to leave and being left to look at your loved one across acres of calorie laden plates (mostly yours), you’d be forgiven for finding all your appetites waning.  We needn’t have bothered anyway, we soon found out that the nan bread was snappable, the pakora was stale and chewy and that some bastards had eaten all the meat out of the curries and just left little potato bits floating in greasy film-topped sauce. We ate little, paid a lot, went home and were in bed like all good Perth diners by 10.30.

Oh, so this is the suburbs right? The next week, with another couple, I dragged the guys in from their beer on the balcony on the account that I was stressing about getting to a restaurant in time. It was Saturday night, albeit (slightly) later, in Northbridge, and again the same old story. We snubbed a favourite Vietnamese to walk around the corner to a Thai, to be rejected, to walk back to the Viet and find the waiter had, in the space of two minutes, just turned over the little red closed sign. We roamed the streets of Northbridge trying to find something a) open and b) BYO (I had carried it all that way after all). We found ourselves in a grossly overpriced Chinese restaurant that kicked us out early anyway.

I know if I go into Northbridge, or Fremantle or the City, the hours in some restaurants may be slightly more flexible, like maybe 9.30, but not enough to accommodate the lack of organisation on my weekend nights. I think that this is not only a reflection of, but an integral part, of Perth’s mind-numbing lack of atmosphere at night. For example, the streets of Rome at night don’t feel rough the way they can in Perth in the later hours. They are not just the haunt of pub goers. In Rome there are families and older people dining till all hours and a variety of open bars and cafes.  This provides a healthier demographic mix at night time and creates a calmer, more relaxed atmosphere. And besides, I’m not organised enough to eat that early.

In Glasgow the pre-theatre special is a massive marketing tool to get diners in early (like anyone actually goes to the theatre in Glasgow), so why can’t we have the same in Perth? They could advertise the late special or the post- pub meal. By my reckoning, many restaurants in the inner suburbs could at least double their sittings in a night and could maybe charge more (we probably wouldn’t notice anyway). I know this is Perth. I’m not expecting our inner suburbs to take on an all night atmosphere of carnivale, but would it be too much to ask to just get another hour of restaurant service?