The Raven Hotel is West End’s newest pub, offering an intimate hospitality experience for the burgeoning Brisbane neighbourhood.

The space is the cellar underneath the bar, a perfect venue for stand up comedy, spoken word or even an escape room or play requiring an underground claustrophobic feeling..

The pub is located in West End, a suburb with a lot of apartment buildings and high-density living. As a pub with a fairly small footprint, the idea was to create an extension of the homes of nearby residents.

“It’s quite a small pub, and the whole goal was to create a Melbourne-style corner gastropub,” explained operations manager Lance Burrows.

“There really isn’t that offering in Brisbane, so we’re trying to create that home away from home extension of people’s living rooms because there’s lots of units around West End.”

The hotel is named after Nicholas Walpole Raven, who owned three acres of land on Montague St, West End in the 1880s. Raven applied for a provisional hotel license on several occasions unsuccessfully, hampered by the strength of the temperance movement in Queensland at the time. After more than a decade of trying, Raven skirted the rejections by opening the West End Club. Customers need to know: