Actually the reopening occurred a couple of weeks earlier, on 17 September when we were still in the air flying from Zürich back to Sydney.

The Thirroul Beach Pavilion was opened in 1940, one year into World War II though it's safe to say that construction had commenced in the late 1930s when there would still be "peace in our time".

In early 2015 the Wollongong City Council declared their intention to close the pavilion for refurbishment later that year. The timing didn't seem to make a lot of sense since it was going to be closed over the summer of 2015/16. However as it turned out the extra time was needed because the work was not finished until September 2016.

In the course of doing the refurbishment it was found that there was an unexpected amount of asbestos in the building (a building from the 1930s, who would have thought it?) as well as some concrete cancer which required a number of walls to be ripped out and rebuilt. As a result, the building was not ready until the summer of 2016/17.

It has been let to new tenants who run another restaurant just down the coast. I have been there a few times since the reopening. The food is generally good though not necessarily great. I don't really have any problems with the service (although it's the "order at the counter" style where you are given a buzzer when your order is ready and you have to go and pick it up yourself), and certainly the view is not bad at all. Although there are occasions when it is hot and the windows are open where you get a few too many flies for my liking. The breakfast is pretty decent, though not quite as good as at some other local places.

Overall though, it's hard to complain about a place by the beachside which serves decent food at prices that aren't completely over the top.