Where - 521 Macaulay Rd. Kensington

Price - $23

Website - http://www.hardimans.com.au

Reviewers – Lee & Nikki

As this month or so of reduxes (reducies? I'm not sure of the plural on that) rolls on I have found myself in the middle of a bit of an existential crisis. Redos on ParmaDaze started simply enough - A pub felt like they got a bit of an unfair shake when they were reviewed, pledged to fix the issues we had with it and asked us to check it out again. We'd go and give it another go and adjust the review score accordingly - Yet over time things have gotten a little murky.

Pubs change hands, new owners move in, buildings get gutted and names get changed - All this blurs the line between what should be considered a "redo" and what should be considered a new pub. For example we considered our recent revisit to The Park Hotel a redo as the name and location of the pub remained the same yet an entirely new team was at the helm, but a week later our visit to Celtic at Metropolitan was listed as a new review and not a redo, the only difference being the latter slightly altered the name of the pub by adding "Celtic at..." to its title when the Park kept theirs unaltered.

Following the train of thought leads to some pretty deep philosophical questions. What makes a new pub new? Do only pubs that retain the same management team/ownership qualify for "redo" status? What about a new head chef taking over a kitchen? It's a Ship of Theseus paradox that I haven't had nearly enough beers to think about without giving myself a headache. To be honest I don't even know how we should clarify what is a Redux and what isn't anymore - I'm open to suggestion so feel free to leave a comment below or on our various social media sites with your thoughts.

Which brings us to this week's review - Kensington's Hardimans Hotel. We first visited Hardimans back in June of 2011 and, well, I'm not gonna sugar coat it - it was a dive. You can read the full review here but the TL;DR is that they had no clean glasses, there were mice openly running around the floor of the pub it was dank, dirty and to be honest one of the worst parmas we have had in the over 8 years we've been doing this, sitting at the bottom of our ladder for quite some time.

Then, last year, Hardiman's shut up shop. New owners took over and basically gutted the building. I noticed during our visit to Kensington Food Hall in April this year that work was being done and have been tracking its progress since - Until Friday last week, when the new look Hardimans opened its doors.

I couldn't even wait until our usual Thursday parma night to check it out, so we loaded up the parma bus on Saturday afternoon and headed to Hardimans to see how it all turned out.