Metropolis is a North Sydney target for those who care little about their surroundings but want a big, cheap bar with no emphasis on character. The meat of the place is back from the street, round the rather intrusive pokie area, where suits mingle with local youngsters out for a rowdy friday. Only one of the two bars is open on our visit, so we grab a couple of schooners and head for a quieter area where there's some space to sit. Unfortunately for me, the lapsed non-smoker, the windowed area overlooking the street is non-smoking, so we scoot up close to the border and take a high table in no man's land where the second bar sits, closed and darkened.

The demographics are young - we feel positively old in the range of 'early thirties' and as we sit a few small knots of under-twenties float past. We're not overly enamoured with the place, to be honest. It gives me the impression of the bars you sometimes get at large caravan and camping sites in early season. It's functional, there's a lot of space, a bunch of pool tables, pinball and other distractions, but it makes no attempt to feel welcoming. It's somewhere we'd do as part of a pub crawl, but not our first choice in the area.

There's food (not tonight though) and entertainment (again, not while we're there) and a club atmosphere later where there'd probably be a reasonable chance of picking up a sozzled single without the high budget pretension of, say, the Greenwood, so bear it in mind for those factors. Otherwise, fair to middling.

review by: Jason