The wind groans through the steel precipice below me, tinkling the metal hook that’s the deceptively flimsy barrier between me and sudden death. Well, that’s what my brain is telling me anyway. Another gust blows through and I crouch to the floor, trying to breathe through the fear. I’m standing 134 metres above the ocean below, at the summit of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Once the panic (and wind) subsides, I manage to summon the courage to peek out at the view. It’s a doozy.
Behind me, the skyscrapers of Circular Quay and The Rocks stand stoically, almost at eye level with me. To the west you can see down to Balmain and the mouth of the Parramatta River; to the east, the Opera House sits pretty and, beyond it, the sparkling, meandering giant that is the Sydney Harbour, spilling all the way out to the city’s much-loved Eastern Beaches and the Pacific Ocean beyond.
It might seem like a strange place to kick off a trip where I’m trying to grasp what it means to eat in this expansive country, but the more you eat in Australia, the more it becomes apparent that this is, in fact, the perfect place to contextualise food down under. The rivers, the ocean, the fields and mountains in the distance are in many ways the lifeblood of Australian cuisine, and the city within it is home to a multitude of chefs doing their best to define exactly what that term means on the plate.
“What we do very well in Australia is be led by ingredients,” Alexandra Carlton, celebrated journalist and World’s 50 Best Restaurants academy chair for Oceania, explains. “Particularly our seafood. You know, we are obviously a land that is skirted by sea, and there’s so much provenance behind our seafood, people are very proud of where it’s come from and love to discuss how it’s caught, the water that it comes from. I really think that seafood is our defining ingredient.”
There’s no better way to discover exactly what Australians are doing with seafood than at Saint Peter, Josh Niland’s formative restaurant which reopened in its new location in the recently renovated Grand National Hotel in Sydney’s Paddington in August 2024. Niland has, as Carlton puts it, “reinvented an entire ingredient and class”. The chef has quickly gained international acclaim for his revolutionary approach to whole-fish cooking. Nicknamed the fish butcher, Niland has developed a multitude of methods to use every part of a fish when cooking with it – in an approach that mirrors the work that chefs like Fergus Henderson were doing with whole-animal cooking in the late 90s.
In theory, the idea of using every element of a fish – from its eyeballs to its tail – sounds less than appealing, but the detail that has garnered Niland such praise is the fact that his food is truly delicious. There is immense innovation taking place in every bite, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it because it’s translated so seamlessly into genuinely good food. It doesn’t feel gimmicky – it just feels like something you would want to eat. Take, for example, the fish charcuterie. Across elements like ‘chorizo’, ‘nduja’, ‘pâté’ and ‘mortadella’, Niland has transformed some of the least desirable parts of a fish into golden tickets – tasty little morsels that easily rival their carnivorous counterparts. Fish eye, meanwhile, finds new life as a gelatinous supplier of texture in a crème brûlée macaron (Niland has also been known to use fish eyes in place of egg yolks in ice cream). The ingredient doesn’t impart any flavour – if anything, it brings a welcome, subtly nuanced depth.
Across elements like ‘chorizo’, ‘nduja’, ‘pâté’ and ‘mortadella’, Niland has transformed some of the least desirable parts of a fish into golden tickets
Josh Niland might be advancing a new era in Australian cooking, but it would be impossible to look at the development of the country’s dining identity without talking about another chef: Neil Perry.
It’s hard to overstate Perry’s influence. His restaurant, Rockpool, was ranked number four in the first ever World’s 50 Best List – a feat particularly impressive with the benefit of hindsight showing Australia’s continual underrepresentation on the list – and his cooking helped redefine Australian food beyond the stereotypical ‘shrimp on a barbie’ ideas. He stepped away from the Rockpool group in 2020 in a semi-retirement of sorts, but dining at his new venture, Margaret in Double Bay, it’s easy to see the impact Perry continues to have on Aussie cuisine, and the reason he has remained such an enduring figure on the global food scene – including being awarded the Icon Award at the 2024 World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards.
One of the best dishes I eat in Australia is at Margaret. It's also the simplest. A delicate piece of King George whiting – a flaky fish endemic to Australia – was cooked perfectly till pearlescent and then arrived simply dressed with lemon juice and Cobram Estate Hojiblanca olive oil. It felt like it completely captured what is so special about eating in Australia.
While Perry may be one of the preeminent names in classically Australian food, a new wave of chefs are building on the country’s enduring culinary reputation as a place of myriad cultural influences. “I think we’re seeing a lot of chefs opening places that are exciting where they’re picking different cultures, both their own backgrounds but also the area that they live in, and the people they know, and putting that onto a plate in ways we haven’t seen before,” Carlton tells me. She name-checks Lorcán Kan, the new head chef at Melbourne wine bar Etta, as an example.
Etta is one of those rare beasts that is front-of-house-owned rather than chef-owned, and yet retains a reputation as one of the city’s most exciting places to eat. That itself is a testament to owner Hannah Green’s immense talent for hospitality and ability to spot culinary talent when it comes to staffing the kitchen at Etta. Kan joined the restaurant in May 2024, and already had locals insisting it was a must-visit. Carlton claimed it as one of her favourite spots in Melbourne while Pat Nourse, creative director of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, was effusive about its merits. Everything we ate felt reflective of modern Australian dining – in this case, Kan fuses his Malaysian heritage with Australian ingredients in each dish, with some heavy hitters including golden tofu with meaty swords of aubergine, and dainty little quail egg skewers in sweet and sour sauce – but it was the chilli parfait that we had for dessert that seemed to exemplify this ethos wholly. It was unlike anything I’d ever eaten, perfectly utilising the moreish whizz of Szechuan pepper with a hum of chilli heat, all of it tempered and sweetened with lime – a quintessentially Aussie ingredient. It was mind-bending in all of the best ways.
Meanwhile, at Aru in Melbourne’s city centre, Australian ingredients and Asian flavours are given a lick of smoke over a wood-fired grill. Inherently Australian ingredients, like muntries – a small, cranberry-like berry – spanner crab, desert lime, Moreton Bay Bug, kingfish and pepperberry are fused with curry pastes, sate, sambal, nahm jim and more to bring them vibrantly to life. The banh mi pâté en croute is a revelation – infusing the flavours of the Vietnamese sandwich into the delicate, meat-rich French pie.
It perfectly utilised the moreish whizz of Szechuan pepper with a hum of chilli
It’s not just a mingling of cultures that defines Australian food in the modern day, though. Mirroring the culinary movement that swept through the Scandi and Nordic regions in the early 2000s, where chefs looked inward and began to cook with and celebrate their native ingredients, dishes and cooking techniques, Australia seems to be having a similar moment, seeing indigenous ingredients being given the culinary attention they deserve – and a real focus on seasonality and locality to boot. Ben Shewry – chef patron of Attica – is largely credited with being one of the first mainstream chefs to do this in-depth, and his cooking quickly garnered a host of accolades, while Attica became a regular on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, including nabbing position 20 in 2018 (although he has since been disparaging of both restaurant awards systems and food journalism in his recently published memoir, Uses for Obsession).
At Big Esso by Mabu Mabu in Federation Square, Torres Straight Islander Nornie Bero is bringing the food of her childhood to the city centre, cooking what is perhaps the most detailed example of Australian cuisine. The menu reads like a Rolodex of the rich and unique larder the country has to cook with – from damper bread – a dense bread usually cooked over a campfire – with golden syrup butter, to tea grass curry paste crocodile tongue skewers; emu heart with ooray plum sauce, kiwi and curry leaf; and emu steak with macadamias and chilli oil.
For a masterclass in modern, hyperlocal dining, we head to Brae, nearly two hours drive from central Melbourne. Home to one of the most astonishing gardens I’ve seen in a long time, Brae grows over 130 plants. The daily yield has a huge influence on the menu; the impressive dish simply listed on the menu as “Brae Farm vegetable garden” features more than 40 ingredients from the garden alone – on our visit it included green almonds and avocado. Elsewhere, lagrima peas are left to shine, paired simply with anise myrtle and chamomile, while plump, lascivious mounds of sea urchin are draped on a chickpea cracker and dressed with honey and espelette pepper. The first summer strawberries arrive fresh from the garden, letting the ripe, bright flavours do the talking without superfluous accompaniment, while pork jowl is given the full treatment, barbecued with smoked eel to produce a sticky, rambunctious skewer of meat. There is a play on halftime oranges, and the storied parsnip and apple cigars to finish things off. The menu is a stirring homage to the power of Australian ingredients, and how the best things to eat in this country don’t have to travel far or receive much intervention in order to tell a culinary story.
To eat well in Australia, or to even try and define what it means to eat in the country in general, is to combine a multitude of influences. Australian food is as much Josh Niland’s groundbreaking approach to cooking with fish as it is Lorcán Kan’s multicultural influences, Neil Perry’s deceptively simple King George Whiting, or Brae’s abundant salad. I think Carlton put it best when I asked her how she would define Australian cuisine when she said “I think Australia suffers a little bit from the idea that we’re a bit of everything. We don’t have any boundaries with what we do, but the things that we come back to are ingredients and flavour, and we do not compromise on those two simple things.”
From the seafood that comes from the ocean that was such a beacon through my fear at the top of the harbour bridge, to the indigenous ingredients grown by First Nations people and the sheer scale of produce that a kitchen garden in the Victorian hinterlands can yield, Australian food is all about taking care with the abundance of exceptional ingredients – and what’s more defining for a cuisine than the literal fruit of a country’s earth?
