For most of the 1940s, the best table in Canberra was a boarding house dining room in Barton, and the man at it was the prime minister.
Ben Chifley lived at the Hotel Kurrajong, which had opened in 1926 as Hostel No. 2, a place to park politicians who had nowhere else to sleep in a capital still drawing its own street plan. Chifley never left. He ate there, took his caucus over breakfast there, and in June 1951 died in room 205 while a Commonwealth Jubilee ball carried on up the hill at Parliament House. The dining room was not a restaurant in any sense we would use now. It was a canteen with the nation's business on the menu. You ate what the kitchen made, at the hour the kitchen made it, and the conversation was the reason for being there.
That was Canberra dining in the 1940s. Institutional, quiet, mostly indoors at someone else's table. A public service town of fewer than 20,000 ate at home, in guest houses, or in hotel dining rooms that ran to a timetable. Nobody went out, because there was nowhere to go.
Hold that thought, because the Kurrajong is still there. It closed in the late 1970s, spent years as government offices, and operated a hotel management school for several years after 1995. It reopened in 2015 after a reported $7.5 million refit. The old dining room is now Chifley's Bar and Grill. You can now sit roughly where the Labor caucus argued over eggs and order a steak. The room outlived the era that made it famous. Keep that in mind as it becomes the pattern.
The 1950s were slow. The town grew, the hostels filled, but the idea of dining as something you did for pleasure had not arrived. As long-time Canberra resident Meryl Hunter later recalled: "Nobody went out to dinner. There was nowhere to go to dinner ... There were no restaurants."
If you wanted something more adventurous than a pub meal, people would drive to Goulburn for Chinese. Canberra was a city on paper before it was one on the plate.
Then the money came. The National Capital Development Commission was set up in 1958, and Canberra stopped being a plan and started being a city. Cities need somewhere to go at night.
In December 1960, the Rex opened on Northbourne Avenue, the largest thing built in Canberra since the war. Eight hundred thousand pounds, five floors, 84 rooms, each with its own bathroom. It arrived with an American Cocktail Bar, a Canberra Lounge, and a Sidewalk Café, which in a town that rolled up the footpaths at 6pm was close to science fiction. For the first time you could put on a good jacket, drive into town, and be somewhere.
The materials told you what it thought of itself. Wallpaper from Japan, carpets from Denmark, floor tiles from Germany, mosaic from Italy and Greece, all shipped to a city that had been a line on a plan five years earlier. The cocktail bar had white marble columns and was the first of its kind in the ACT. At the entrance hung a 37-foot mosaic by the Sydney artist Margo Lewers, 3000 tiles called Expansion. The now heritage-listed work was described, in its heritage citation, as "a significant feature that marked the entrance into the city".
Standing in front of it today, guest relations manager Nicole Ciaccia said the hotel had been a go-to for the rich and famous passing through the capital from a notorious visit by US president Lyndon Johnson in 1966, to a young Prince Charles in the 1980s.
"I think about the martini sipping, gloves and hats, and the sort of conversations that went on - if the walls could talk," she said.
The night before the doors first opened to the public in 1960, 200 people paid two guineas each just to walk through it, and the proceeds went to Legacy. The Minister for the Interior, Gordon Freeth, opened it properly the next evening in front of 500. The main dining room ran from 7.30am until 10pm, and room service ran around the clock, in a town where a meal after six had until then been a real problem. The man in charge was Eric Baker. London-born, third generation in the trade, he had spent the war on Arctic convoys before turning up in Canberra a member of the International Academy of Chefs de Cuisine.
The Rex was never really about the food. It was about leaving the house.
Two years later a Cantonese kitchen opened in a basement off Garema Place, and it is the reason this story has a living end.
Happy's was started by a man the town called Mr Happy, who arrived in the 1950s, was too shy to try his English, and smiled at everyone instead until the smile became his name. He opened first in Queanbeyan in 1958, then took the Civic basement on 1 December 1962. It is still there. Still underground. Still in the family, run now by Gavin Chan, Mr Happy's grandson, three generations deep.
And generations of revellers have also passed through the doors over the decades - some of the place's earliest customers, who knew Gavin as a child, followed by their own children and grandchildren.
"I love it when people come in and tell us they had their first date here 40 years ago, or people who came here as university students who are now bringing their own families in," he said.
"I'm not great with names, but I'm good with faces and remembering orders and there's nothing that brings us greater satisfaction than seeing happy faces."
In a city that has spent decades reinventing itself, Happy's has endured by doing almost the opposite.
Down the road the same year, the Charcoal Restaurant lit its grill in the Melbourne Building on London Circuit, Menzies in the Lodge and the pound still in your pocket. It was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Empires have shifted, currencies have disappeared and governments have come and gone. The Charcoal is still there, red leather and patterned carpet climbing the walls, a 1962 steakhouse preserved like a fly in amber.
Line the three up and the shape is clear. The 1940s ate in because the town was too small and too new to do anything else. The 1950s waited. The 1960s finally went out, in multiple ways.
These venues are still serving. Chifley's steak sits where a Prime Minister once gathered his breakfast caucus. Happy's is still tucked beneath Garema Place, serving Cantonese in the same basement dining room that first welcomed Canberrans in the Menzies years. The Rex, which has hosted many hundreds of school formals and famously welcomed Lyndon Johnson in 1966, continues to trade from the same address.
For most of the 1940s, the best table in town was a boarding house dining room, because there was little else worth booking. It took Canberra nearly 20 years to build somewhere people wanted to go at night. The remarkable part is not how long that took. It is that when the city finally learned to dine out, some of the first tables it set have never really been cleared.
