Pony up for a nostalgia and hummus-soaked trip back through time

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Ode to Sirens is a nostalgia trip wrapped in a restaurant.

With ’70s bands The Troggs and The Kinks playing loudly in the background and classic ’70s cocktails like a Margarita – not the Tommy version – spicing up the drinks list, Ode to Sirens dishes up Greek-ish food at the heritage-listed P&O Hotel in High Street, Fremantle.

Open just a few weeks, Ode signals restaurateur Daniel Goodsell’s return to hospitality after a few years away following a stellar career opening and operating venues like Balthazar, Gordon Street Garage and other restaurants associated with hospitality money-man Nick Trimbole.

The walls of the big venue are adorned with album covers from the 70s and large format photography of popular bands and performers of the era.

The menu is presented in a 45 (aka single) record sleeve and the bill is presented on an old 45.

LPs play on old steam radio record players and customers, even younger ones, seem enraptured by the concept.

Goodsell has ushered in the return of the pony, a small beer invented in the 1950s by Australians who needed the tiny format to beat the heat.

The pony was a five-ounce (150 millilitre) pour which took a minute or two to drink, even at a leisurely pace, not enough time for it to get warm on a 38 degree day.

Our grandads used to drink ponies all day long and then they faded into obscurity as pints and middies and schooners took over.

Nothing says old-timey nostalgia like a pony.

With a pony of Swan Draught in hand and a seat by the large, decked courtyard out back, the small pub-style dishes began arriving.

Hummus was decorated with thin slices of raw beetroot and carrot and big sprigs of parsley. It was not an over-processed paste of chickpeas, slightly textural, not chunky, but toothsome.

It needed more tahini. We could barely taste it in the mix, but teamed with warm pita breads and raw veg, it was a cracking starter.

“Aww, this is beautiful darl. What do you call these things again?” as Darryl Kerrigan inquired with great pride. “Rissoles darl.”

Ode’s charred pork sausages were snags in the American breakfast sausage manner; unskinned, small patties of deeply charred, rough-ground pork meat, more like rissoles than sausages.

They smelled and tasted like a Saturday morning sausage sizzle in the Bunnings car park. So tasty.

It’s the little things one notices. The patties were served with thin slices of cornichon. Whole or halved cornichons would have been too bold a mouthful for the snags. The thin slivers delivered the right amount of pickle sourness.

It’s inconceivable that you would have a charred sausage without tomato sauce, so we asked for some on the side. It was like a 1970s backyard barbie in the mouth.

“Weed and feta” pide was on the expensive side for $20. Pide is the Turkish version of pizza or baked flatbread. It is served on a yeast dough like pizza.

This version wasn’t. Crumbly, piquant feta and handfuls of bitter herbs and greens were applied to an Indian-style layered and ghee-laden flatbread like paratha. So, not a pide, but a super tasty flatbread.

In this instance, it was better than pide with swaggering flavour and crunchy-bottomed flaky flatbread.

Yiros had all the flavour of the 3am doner with chopped tomato, onion, tabouleh and lashings of tzatziki. The shaved lamb meat was at once charred and soft. It wasn’t rolled like you get at a kebab shop, but was, ahem, deconstructed, with the fillings laid out on a large doner wrap. Delightful.

The cocktails at Ode to Sirens are all named after songs: I like pina colada (Rupert Holmes, 1979), Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffett, 1977), another tequila sunrise (The Eagles, 1973).

The pina colada engaged the thrust capacitor and took us back to the ’70s. It was beautifully made.

Bad pina coladas are made with that horrible Malibu rotgut and cheap alcohol. Ode’s version was made cleanly and precisely with good white rum, a splash of lime, coconut milk and rimmed with a wedge of pineapple. It was a bona fide fruity cocktail for those of us who prefer stirred-down classics.

The Margarita was also classically, cleanly made with wincingly sour flavour and a slight smoke from the tequila. Importantly, the rim was not rolled in a packet of salt crystals. Too often bar tenders overpower the drink with salt.

Ode to Sirens is a quirky hotel dining room, very much the expression of its owner, a muso and music producer.

At heart, it’s a good pub with great beers, a modest wine list, great cocktails and a pub vibe from bar staff who like their customers.