Sydney for foodies

Best restaurants

Sydney's CBD eats better than its reputation suggests. Between Martin Place and King Street Wharf, a compact grid of laneways and Georgian arcades hides kitchens doing serious work across a dozen cuisines: a Japanese counter on the financial spine, a Malaysian kopitiam on York, a Merivale brasserie in a converted piano showroom, an Indonesian sambal specialist off Kent. The list below sticks to the walkable core between roughly George, Kent, Sussex and Clarence: twelve rooms you can string into a week without leaving the 2000 postcode, or into a single ambitious day of grazing. It leans on OpenStreetMap-verified addresses, phone numbers and hours; the opinions are mine. What Sydney has, more than any headline chef, is depth in the middle: neighbourhood Chinese that stays open past midnight on weekends, Indian vegetarian that runs every day of the week, French bistro cooking in a laneway that most visitors walk past. That is the shape of this list, not the harbour-view splurge, but the working city's dinner.