No booking needed for the public bar. It sits directly across from Flinders Street Station, so it is the easiest meeting point in the city. The first-floor rooms and the rooftop fill fast on AFL match days and Friday evenings.
Young & Jackson occupies the most famous corner in Melbourne, directly across Flinders Street from the station steps where the city has arranged to meet for more than a century. A pub has stood here since 1861, when it opened as the Princes Bridge Hotel, and the building has been on the Victorian Heritage Register long enough that it now reads as a landmark first and a watering hole second. That history is the whole point. You do not come here for the cocktail programme. You come because this is the pub Melbourne keeps coming back to.
The draw upstairs is Chloe, the full-length nude that French painter Jules Joseph Lefebvre completed in 1875. The hotel bought it in 1908, and per the Victorian Heritage Database it has hung here ever since, surviving the indignity of a serviceman throwing beer at it in 1943. The painting gives the first-floor dining room its name and gives the whole place a story that no new bar can manufacture. It is worth the walk up the stairs whether or not you are eating.
What you get at street level is a proper Australian pub: a long beer list, honest pub food, and a crowd that turns over from office workers to football crowds to travellers fresh off the train. For the more considered side of Melbourne drinking, pair a visit here with Black Pearl in Fitzroy or the beer depth at The Local Taphouse in St Kilda. Young & Jackson is not trying to compete with either. It is the constant the rest of the city is measured against.
The rotating taps lean Victorian and Australian. Ask what is freshest and drink it at the window with Flinders Street Station in view. This is the order the room is built for.
The default Melbourne pub pour, done properly and poured cold. The safest, most honest choice in the building.
The first-floor dining room, named for the painting, runs a Modern Australian pub menu of burgers and the classics. Eat here for the view over the intersection.
A straightforward by-the-glass list for anyone skipping the beer. Reliable rather than ambitious, which suits the room.