48 Best Restaurants in Sydney, New South Wales

For two hours—or as long as it takes for you to consume delicately steamed prawns, luscious mud crab with ginger and shallots, and pipis with black-bean sauce—you might as well be in Hong Kong. This place is heaven for seafood lovers, with wall-to-wall fish tanks filled with crab, lobster, abalone, and schools of barramundi, parrotfish, and coral trout. You won't have to ask if the food is fresh: most of it is swimming around you as you eat. Come for the big-ticket seafood or a simple meal of deep-fried duck. Supper is served until 4 am so it's popular with late-night revelers. It's not the prettiest of places and service can be hit-and-miss, but it has a legion of fans.

Griddle pan dishes are the draw at this friendly, and slightly noisy, organic café and food store on the city fringe. Served in cast-iron skillets and topped with two baked eggs, the griddle choices include creamed corn with chorizo or their own home-cured smoky bacon. Cakes and baked goods are made on the premises; diners return time and time again for the coconut cake to savor with a great cup of tea or coffee. It's a perfect break after shopping in nearby trendy Darlinghurst. Much of the produce on the shelves are ingredients used in the meals, and the tea and coffee are grown on organic or biodynamic farms. Here's a place you can happily (and healthily!) browse.

This hidden gem is the city offering of the popular Grounds of Alexandria, a dog- and kid-friendly eatery with a on-site urban farm that's found just outside of the city. This French-style café is less country rustic and more city slick. It's all low lighting, vintage interiors, with soft velvet seating and intimate booths. And the menu edges toward Parisian-bistro influence, with its croque monsieur a favorite dish. There's outstanding coffee, fresh juices, and breakfast and lunch cocktails. The service is always exceptional.

The cocktails are legendary, the view is captivating, and the food, a traditional Chinese/Malay fusion, is extraordinary. After 50 years in the business (first opened in 1963), in different venues around Sydney, this modern Asian restaurant still does a roaring trade. Signature dishes include beef Rendang (Indonesian-style beef curry), and the spanner crab san choy bow, a fabulous twist on a classic dish. Try one of the four set menus (for a minimum of three people) for a true feast on the extensive menu's flavor combinations.

Celeb-chef Matt Moran’s much-celebrated beachfront fish-and-chips offering is so much more than just standard fish-and-chips. The ocean views enhance a small and select seafood menu that includes fresh Sydney rock oysters, charcoal-grilled snapper, prawns, salmon, and whole fish of the day. The fancy fish fingers, fish burgers, and classic beer-battered fillets are musts.

Few restaurants have the magnetic pull of Otto, a place where radio shock jocks sit side by side with fashion-magazine editors and confirmed foodies. Yes, it's a scene, but fortunately one with good Italian food prepared by chef Richard Ptacnik. The homemade pastas are menu standouts; try the strozzapreti pasta with prawns or the saffron fettucine with rabbit ragout. The pepper-crusted swordfish with romesco sauce is also delicious. The selection of Italian wines is expensive but rarely matched this far from Milan.

Started as a specialty coffee creator, Pablo & Rusty opened a sit-down café back in 2010 and it has been a popular spot for coffee meetups ever since. The interiors are stylish and hip, there are single-origin espressos and sophisticated breakfasts and lunches. There's also outdoor seating.

Founded by two Australians who had been on a road trip to the United States, the pair returned and launched Pancakes on The Rocks in the 1950s. Seven decades later and it's still an iconic eatery in Sydney. There's a huge array of pancakes available, and each are American-style, arriving with eggs, bacon, and syrup.

You'll probably have to wait to get one of the tiny tables in this rustic hole-in-the-wall café and wine bar on the northern end of Bondi Beach, but it's worth waiting for as it's one of the best (and healthiest) breakfasts in Bondi. Once you've got a seat and a cup of the fabulous coffee, the service is fast and efficient. Breakfasts range from porridge with flaxseed, amaranth, and quinoa to bowls of kale, spinach, coriander, mint, and avocado, with a couple of eggs thrown in for good measure. After sundown, the café morphs into a hip little wine bar on weekends.

Owned by Vietnamese TV chef Luke Nguyen, this restaurant is popular with his legions of TV fans. Diners should always start with the country's great export, rice paper rolls. Here you can have them filled with roast duck, enoki mushrooms, and herbs; or prawns and pork. Another tasty dish is ga chien don—crispy skinned chicken slowly poached in master stock with ginger, shallot, and oyster sauce. An unusual but yummy dessert is the black sesame seed dumplings with black sesame seed ice cream. For the full range of flavors, there's a tasting menu of nine dishes.

It might look like nothing more than a hole-in-the-wall but this modest café has been hailed by locals as serving the best coffee in the Potts Point and Kings Cross area. And the seating outside is always packed every morning of the week. To find it, you'll need to head down Llankelly Place, a back lane that runs behind Potts Point, that offers many unique cafés and restaurants. Easy grab'n'go eats and specialized coffee, with single origin option rotated weekly. More than a tiny opening crammed with tables that flow out onto Llankelly Place, this cozy café serves some of the best coffee in the Kings Cross area.

North Bondi Beach wouldn't be the same without Sean's Panaroma ("Sean's" to locals), perched on a slight rise a stone's throw from the famous beach. It's been there since the mid-1990s and owner Sean Moran loads his menu with fresh produce grown on his farm in the Blue Mountains, aptly named "Farm Panaroma." Dishes change regularly and are only featured on a blackboard: they may include baked blue-eye fish with roasted cauliflower, or a ravioli of zucchini, mozzarella, and lemons. The many fans in Sydney means it can be difficult to secure a table, and some the say the service is hit-and-miss (if not a bit arrogant), so be warned.

In 2019, this café opened Sydney's first self-serve batch-brew bar, with craft beer--style taps where you can drink as much single-origin coffee as your heart desires or can handle. But this is more than just an übertrendy spot for coffee: the menu is filled with quirky dishes, with many vegan offerings. The eggplant katsu roll is very popular.

Darling Harbour and Barangaroo are undoubtedly two of the busiest areas of Sydney so for a quiet reprieve step into this tucked-away café. With an impressive wooden art installation snaking around the ceiling, outstanding coffee and freshly baked croissants and muffins, this is the perfect place to recharge before more adventuring.

The culinary focus of this chic basement eatery—another of the restaurants owned by Neil Perry of Rockpool fame—is regional China. There are dishes from far-flung Yunnan, Hunan, and Sichuan provinces, and as the names suggests, they all have a kick. The food is meant to be shared, so pass around the ginger shallot crab, the pork belly, or the extra spicy hot and numbing crispy duck. It's a busy, trendy eatery (down a somewhat steep flight of stairs), so if you have to wait at the bar for a table, grab a cocktail and a spicy pork bun and take in the opium den ambience. Cocktails are named after the Chinese Zodiac; if you're born in the Year of the Dragon you might like to sip on a refreshing mix of lemongrass and rose soda, citrus, and Tanqueray gin.

Found within the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, this is a popular choice from breakfast all the way up to a late dinner. There are three menus in total, with brunch, main meals, and cocktails with light bites. But each is Italian inspired, with hearty risottos, wood-fire pizzas, and plenty of pasta dishes. On weekends, there's bottomless brunch which is four courses and as many mimosas as your heart desires.  

Most people come to this buzzy bar at the end of Pier 4 for a quick bite before a show at the adjacent Sydney Theatre Company, but the views of the Harbour Bridge are so spectacular that it's worth coming here any time. It gets busy before a show starts, but then the crowd vanishes, leaving it a pleasant place to linger over a quiet glass of wine or cocktail and soak in the amazing view. The menu is split into small tapas-style eats to share or large mains, and there's plenty of variety from hearty pastas, fish-and-chips and antipasto boards.

Found a little farther up Bondi Road, away from the beach, this restaurant has been a bit of an unexpected hit since opening in 2018. Unexpected because it's housed above a run-down pub called The Royal. But once you're up the stairs, it's an incredibly classy restaurant serving Italian-inspired wood-fired mains. The chef Khan Danis has worked at some of the best restaurants in Sydney and is hailed as the king of wood fire in the city. Each dish is impressive, with pizza-size flatbreads arriving with house-made charcuterie, pickled fish, stracciatella and seasonal fruit. There's also alfresco dining available, and there's lunch and dinner served every day.