The best restaurants in Sydney

Few dining rooms in Sydney are as legendary as this one inside the 1920s art deco pavilion on the Balmoral Beach esplanade in Mosman. Executive chef Aaron Ward, previously of Sixpenny, works closely with producers, farmers, and fishermen, and the menu is built to celebrate what they grow and catch. Floor-to-ceiling windows look directly out over the beach, and a 350-bottle wine list skewing Australian sits alongside impeccable service.

New York’s great mid-century steakhouses provided the blueprint, and Bridge Street in the CBD is where the Pellegrino 2000 team built their Sydney interpretation. Dan Pepperell, Michael Clift, and Andy Tyson channel that opulence through an Australian lens with head chef Sam Galloway leading a menu built around a full raw bar, prime cuts from a Josper charcoal oven, and whole fish filleted tableside with a pop of theatre. The lobster spaghetti has become a house signature; the gin martini and world-class Chablis selection give the bar its own reason to visit.

Long-serving staff who know the regulars by name make Fontana one of the warmest restaurants in the area. Daniel Johnston, Ivey Wawn and Harry Levy keep the menu grounded in Italian cooking with daily-made fresh ricotta and garlic bread as permanent fixtures, and the baccalà mantecato inside roasted peeled peppers as the dish most likely to bring you back. A natural wine list from small producers runs through the meal, and the house gin martini has built a following of its own.

The inspiration behind this moody CBD newcomer is Michael Clift’s Chinese grandfather, whose love of food shaped the chef’s own instincts from an early age. The kitchen draws on Cantonese and Sichuan cooking, with a whole Peking duck with mandarin pancakes anchoring a menu built for sharing. Cocktails lean into the setting with an MSG Martini and Sesame Sazerac alongside a world-class riesling selection. The neon-lit Angel Place room channels 1980s Chinese diner energy and marks the newest project from the trio behind Pellegrino 2000 and Clam Bar.

Tucked below Clam Bar in the CBD, Neptune’s Grotto is the most focused restaurant yet from Dan Pepperell, Michael Clift and Andy Tyson. Northern Italian cooking, specifically the rich, slow-cooked traditions of Emilia-Romagna, organises the menu. Handmade pastas, cotoletta alla panna in cream sauce, and a lasagne alla bolognese built on spinach pasta are the dishes to come for. The Barolo selection is one of the strongest in Sydney, and the candlelit basement is exactly the kind of room where an entire evening disappears without notice.

This Surry Hills trattoria has been one of the city’s most coveted bookings since opening in 2022. Two distinct moods across two floors, intimate and candlelit downstairs, louder and more communal upstairs, mean you pick the kind of evening you want before you arrive. Prawn ravioli in brown butter and lemon and a crema caramel that has become the restaurant’s most-requested closer are the dishes that define the kitchen. A world-class Brunello and Chianti list serve as excellent companions. You know you’re in good hands because the restaurant is from the team behind the CBD favourite Clam Bar.

The canard à la presse, a tableside preparation requiring a specialised duck press, is the centrepiece of the menu at chef Nik Hill’s classic French bistro. Take a look at the chalkboard menu to build on your order from there and enjoy it all in a room with a wood-burning fireplace. Downstairs, L’Avant Cave operates as a looser, wine-forward space with a list that leads with Jura and extends into French, Australian and European selections.

At Sixpenny, chef-owner Dan Puskas and head chef Tony Schifilliti have built a kitchen organised entirely around koji fermentation with fermented pastes, garums, and aged preparations running through every course of the seven-course tasting menu. Three Good Food Guide hats and three wine glasses from the Australian Wine List of the Year Awards show you just why this restaurant remains a Sydney institution.

Fifteen years training at the finest sushi counters in Japan preceded chef Toshihiko Oe’s move to Australia, and that foundation is felt immediately at his eight-seat counter inside Gyokuu at the new Sydney Fish Market in Pyrmont. The omakase is built around seafood sourced by hand each morning from one of the world’s great fish markets. The tuna nigiri course is among the standouts and imported Japanese sake is the companion throughout.

At Sander Nooij’s Potts Point restaurant, the botanical tasting menu changes entirely with the seasons. The restaurant became fully plant-based in 2021 under Nooij’s helm. The team sources exclusively from local producers, and builds each course around a single ingredient at its peak. Koji fermentation, house miso, and freshly milled flour thread through the dishes; housemade ferments including kombucha, amazake, and water kefir sit alongside a wine list from small-scale, sustainable producers.

More than a decade after the wood-fired oven first fired up in a converted Chippendale garage, Ester remains one of the most important restaurants in Sydney. Mat Lindsay’s kitchen turns out dishes like fermented potato bread and king prawns in fermented shrimp butter, and you’re likely to eat something different each time you visit. An organic and biodynamic wine list drawn from Australia and further afield reinforces the kitchen’s values. The room, with its concrete ceiling, pendant lights, and stucco archways, is the perfect vehicle for this next-level experience.

Sardinia on Sydney’s Northern Beaches sounds like a stretch until you sit down at Pilu, where Giovanni Pilu and Marilyn Annecchini have built something deeply personal. The cooking is a sustained tribute to the island’s coastal ingredients, regional pastas, and instinct for combining simplicity with depth. The restaurant’s culurgiones—stuffed with roasted potato and crispy chicken skin—are so popular that Pilu makes 20,000 of them each year. Sardinian and Italian wines from small producers, including bottles that rarely travel beyond the island, round out any meal here.

When the fin-to-scale philosophy—dry-aged cuts, charcuterie made from parts typically discarded, nothing wasted—first came out of a small Paddington restaurant in 2016, it changed the way chefs around the world thought about seafood. Josh and Julie Niland’s Saint Peter has since moved to the heritage Grand National Hotel in Paddington and earned three Good Food Guide hats. The daily-changing tasting menu reflects whatever arrived from the market that morning. The oyster shell martini extends the kitchen’s zero-waste logic into the glass, and you should pair it with your dinner.

An all-natural wine list leaning Italian with French and Australian additions is the organising principle at this long-standing Paddington institution, and the seasonal menu from Enrico and Giovanni Paradiso is built entirely to honour it. Don’t leave without an order of the pretzel with whipped bottarga. Tables are close, the lighting is low, and the room consistently produces nights that run longer than planned.

A seasonal Italian menu anchored by a lasagne al forno that never leaves. A wine list built on organically and biodynamically farmed producers with a strong by-the-glass selection. And a terrace that opens onto one of the neighbourhood’s best streets for people watching. No wonder Fratelli Paradiso has been a Potts Point favourite for decades. The regulars who fill the room have been coming for years, and their ease gives Fratelli Paradiso an atmosphere that you’ll want to keep soaking up over repeat visits.

At Federico Zanellato’s Pyrmont harbour restaurant, Italian and Japanese cooking work together seamlessly on the tasting menu Toothfish with macadamia and oyster sauce and poached spanner crab give way to a passion fruit ice cream with bergamot zabaione and lemon curd. The wine list leans Italian and French, with a strong sake selection alongside it. A glass-walled room above the harbour with water visible on three sides makes the setting as considered as the cooking.

The same Greek cooking philosophy that made The Apollo in Potts Point one of Sydney’s most enduring restaurants takes on a larger and more communal form at Olympus in Redfern. Head chef Ozge Kalvo draws on her Aegean heritage and a wood-fire and charcoal kitchen to produce a menu of mezedes, spanakopita, grilled sardines, and slow-cooked lamb built for sharing across a table. The 200-seat room sits beneath a sweeping glass roof with a 50-year-old bougainvillea spreading its branches overhead making it one of the most breathtaking dining rooms in town.

The coal-fire cooking and fermentation philosophy that made Ester a Sydney essential finds a looser, more convivial format at Mat Lindsay’s Surry Hills follow-up. Small sharing plates built on smoke and umami are the vehicle; co-owner and sommelier Julien Dromgool’s wine list, drawn exclusively from organic and biodynamic producers, is the companion. A red door opens into a room designed by Anthony Gill with communal tables and an atmosphere that suits a long, unhurried evening without requiring a special occasion to justify it.

More than a decade after opening in Potts Point, The Apollo remains one of Sydney’s most beloved restaurants. It’s built on the shared Greek-Australian heritage of Jonathan Barthelmess and Sam Christie. The menu is rooted in the cooking both grew up eating, running from taramasalata made from mullet roe to slow-cooked lamb shoulder. The 1930s building it’s in was stripped back to expose concrete, marble, and brass before opening, and what emerged has kept its appeal across more than a decade of Sydney dining.