I’ve worked in the Sydney CBD for 35 years. Over those years, there’s bars I’ve frequented more than most because they were convenient, they were cheap, they served good food etc And when I get onto a good thing I stick to. It
I had two eras of patronising the Combined Services RSL, which ended its days as Barracks – but it’ll always be the Combined to me. Sadly, the Combined is no longer. I thought I’d sneak in for a nostalgic schooner before dinner with old mates – but was confronted by the laminated sign above. Nooooo – say it ain’t so. Permanently closed and merging with the Castlereagh Club near the corner of Park and Castlereagh.
My first era of the Combined was the early 2000s. Can’t be exactly sure when, but I was working around the corner for a big bank on a big project. Fortuitously, @illiards was also working on the same project. There were plenty of debriefs to be had at the Combined at the end of the day. We were also attracted by the extremely low price of schooners at the time.
The Combined was often referred to as The Ashtray due to the pall of smoke you’d walk into when you entered. Sydney was transitioning to non smoking in pubs and one of the steps in the transition was to divide pubs into smoking and non-smoking areas. Most pubs managed this by having a smoking section that was separate from a non-smoking section. The Combined simply ran some masking tape down the middle of the floor. I may have smoked back in those days and would park a table over the masking tape and stand on the smoking side and talk to a non-smoking mate on the other side of the same table.
In the early 2010s, I moved back into the orbit of the Combined. By this stage the Combined had installed a fine dining white table cloth restaurant on the first floor – which was trying to take on the Fairmont above the Occidental Hotel. We gave it a crack. It was closer and cheaper than the Fairmont and you could always get a table (unlike the Fairmont).
The menu was old school. The “From the Grill” was my go-to section, but I never did take on the Widow Maker. I was working on a particularly difficult project with a demanding (aka bunch of pr1cks) steering committee and after the monthly Steering Committee myself, the Programme Director and my 2IC would retire to the Combined Dining Room to draft the minutes and bitch and moan about most members of that Stereing Committee meeting. It was a long project so we dined there often, so much so that the Combined was often referred to as The Spiritual Home of the product we ultimately delivered.
The head chef changed numerous times over the years and eventually I moved to a different part of the CBD, and my patronage of the Combined dwindled. Every now and then I’d pull in for a reminiscing schooner, but it wasn’t the same without the drinking partners of old.
The demise of the Combined is definitely the end of an era. We are hoping that the Commercial Travellers Association emerges from its long hiatus to ensure there’s at least one of school joint left in the CBD. The Occidental is still going strong, and the Fairmont is back to its glory days – but the numbers of these old school steak joints is dwindling.
Vale the Combined Services RSL. You won’t be forgotten.
back of the ferry 