Ken Bartholomew takes another drag of his cigarette as he waits for his friend outside the Forest Lodge Hotel in Sydney’s inner-west. Bartholomew, who has lived in the area for 75 years, has been a regular patron of the pub since he was 15.

But his weekly pool games with friends at the Forest Lodge Hotel – or ‘The Flodge’, as it is known to many – stopped two months ago when the pub was forced to shut its doors due to the state government’s coronavirus restrictions.

“It’s been murder,” Bartholomew says. “We’ve been in this routine for years, playing pool here on a Friday.”

For the first time since March, cafes, restaurants and pubs with kitchens across the state have been allowed to reopen on Friday, as Covid-19 lockdowns ease. There are rules: all venues can only serve a maximum of 10 patrons at a time, and must allow 4 sq metres of space per person. Pubs and clubs, like the Forest Lodge, are also only allowed to open “an eating area on the premises” and can serve alcohol “only if any liquor sold is sold with or ancillary to food served”.

It’s a welcome change for Irene and Matthew Sen, who have owned the Forest Lodge Hotel for the past eight years. Even though the hotel moved to selling takeaway meals and bottled craft beers during the lockdown, the couple say they lost 83% in revenue.

“We’ve been very grateful for the support of locals,” Matthew says.

“Irene and I have spent a lot of time here every evening [over the past few weeks], and we have met a whole lot of locals and local families that we didn’t know we had. Our business customers and uni students have all disappeared. It’s the local families that have really kept us going,” Matthew says.

Irene says they were a “bit nervous” about reopening the Forest Lodge Hotel to only 10 customers, and have spent the last few days since the government announced pubs could reopen introducing systems, like allotted booking times, to maximise each service period.

Even though they can only have 10 patrons at a time, Matthew says reopening is important to “staying relevant”.

“We are very proud of what we have achieved here, and what we are doing here,” Matthew says. “We are one of the few independent pubs around, owned by a husband and wife. We are not part of a restaurant group.”

“It’s been great to put ourselves out in the community and get to know all the people in [the surrounding neighbourhoods].”

A few suburbs over, in Chippendale, the Rose Hotel also opened its doors to diners for the first time in months. The pub looks like a shadow of its former self: gone is the iconic beer garden and Friday lunch-time queues; the 10 permitted patrons are scattered around the usually buzzing bar. And yet, manager Joe Maree looks busier than ever, dashing off in-between the Guardian Australia’s questions to serve meals and take phone bookings.

“It’s been great,” he says about opening back up. “A really positive response. We have had bookings out through today, bookings tomorrow, we are booked out on Sunday.”

Seb and JP, two men sharing beers at a table by the front door, say they rang up and made a booking as soon as they heard the news that pubs could reopen.

“We both live on this street. We both moved to Sydney recently, me about 10 months ago, and this place became our semi-regular. It’s got sentimental value to us now, it’s where we’ve had fun times,” Seb says.

“The first thing we wanted to do was come here so we could give back and support the local businesses. We actually have a booking for another pub straight after this,” he says with a laugh.

Despite restrictions easing, many of the city’s most popular venues have remained closed on Friday, including the Kings Cross Hotel, Bar Broadway, the Newtown Hotel and the Bank. Joy Ng of the Bearded Tit, a bar and performance space that caters to Sydney’s LGBTIQ community, said that they couldn’t justify the cost of reopening under the current restrictions.

But one of the biggest challenges for pubs that have reopened, including the Forest Lodge Hotel, is how to create a pub atmosphere when so few people are allowed inside at a time.

In addition to offering pub trivia online, Matthew says “we’ve changed the layout of the tables obviously, and we are going to bring in a lot more greenery. I stole that fake bamboo from the gaming room which Irene hates,” he says, pointing to a large plant between two tables.

“Oh yes, that has got to go,” Irene laughs.

“But I think it’s all about the attitude,” he says.

Thankfully, that’s one of the pub’s biggest selling points according to Ken Batholomew’s friend, Wayne, and the reason that he and Ken showed up despite the pool tables still being packed away.

“Some places you go to you have to go a hundred times and they still don’t know you, but you come here once and after that you’re sweet.”