HUNGRY FOR MORE.

March has been the month for old hands opening new restaurants.

Interesting how each month takes on its own shape. March has been a great one for second (and third and fourth) takes from some of our boldest and brightest chefs and restaurateurs.

Some are on the world domination trail, with Alessandro and Anna Pavoni opening Cibaria in Manly; others are consolidating, like the Paisano team turning Australia Street, Newtown, into a gastrodome.

Some have opened a new restaurant because that’s pretty much all they know how to do (hello, Peter Conistis), and others are flexing their independent muscles, having been head chef elsewhere for eons (Josh Raine of Tetsuya with his first wine bar).

New partnerships are being formed, from friendships and commonalities – hence Dan Puskas of Sixpenny joining Baba’s Place in taking over the old Hungarian hotspot Corner 75.

One thing that most of them have in common is modesty – they’re more lace curtain than luxurious. Another is honesty, in what they offer people, and how they communicate.

These two traits I find far more exciting than old-growth Bordeaux or having my photo 3D-printed onto my dessert (it happens).

So here’s Sydney dining in March, measured in old dogs and new tricks.

---

Thanks for joining, by the way, and welcome to this monthly report from a recovering restaurant critic. I hope you’ll find something of interest - a great new place to check out, an old favourite flagged, a dish to try, a trend you may or may not endorse but value knowing that it’s happening.

AND ALSO, HUNGARY FOR MORE: CORNER 75

I'd just left school, and was living in a boarding house in St Kilda in Melbourne. I had no dough left after buying cigarettes, and used to pick up a single can of PMU soup and make it last over two nights. (By heating half the contents and not adding water, you get stew instead of soup).

My landlord was an old Hungarian who had once owned a restaurant in Budapest. He hated that I smoked cigarettes instead of eating, and every now and then would invite me to join him for tea.

He’d make a soup of chicken giblets and egg noodles in chicken broth, and serve me a little glass of hospital brandy on the side, and we’d talk (and smoke) all night. He was lonely, and I was hungry; it was a good deal.

Since then, I’ve taught myself to make that soup, but when I heard that Paul Varga of Corner 75 in Randwick had retired, and the restaurant had very sympathetic new owners, the boarding house memories came rushing back. I had to go and have a bowl of soup for my old landlord.

Sweetly, the restaurant is now in the hands of Dan Puskas (note the Hungarian heritage) of Sixpenny, teaming up with Jean-Paul El Tom and Alex Kelly and the gang from Baba’s Place in Marrickville.

It’s a charming spot, with its lace curtains, old photos and insistence that this is how a restaurant should be; true to its original callings; a home away from home that reflects and honours the culture it comes from.

Wait, there’s no chicken giblet soup! Perhaps they would like my recipe for szarnyasaprolek-leves. But there are two soups, so I order both. They smell like grandmothers’ kitchens; the gulyasleves studded with tender beef and the chicken broth bearing a soft golf ball of semolina dumpling.

It’s a small, modest menu, in a small, modest cottage-cute restaurant, with friendly prices. Love the bitterness of green peppers and the sweetness of paprika, without the heavy-handed roux and thickening agents of the past. Try LP’s beautiful, skin-cracking pork and paprika sausage, the honey-sticky cheese scone, and the bubbly, crisp pork schnitzel, and explore the list of Hungarian wines. 75 Frenchmans Road, Randwick www.corner75.com.au

OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS: ELA ELA, THE BRISTOL.

Peter Conistis is an old hand at opening restaurants, here and overseas. This new one, Ela Ela (the name comes from the Greek mother’s call to her family to “come, come” to the table) is his modern take on a mezedopolio, or house of meze.

It’s a typical, smartened-up pub dining room on the ground floor of an 1898 restored Sydney hotel, but the plates bring it home. Greek dips, mini wood-grilled pitas and tender, wood-grilled octopus with gigantes beans. Veal keftedes, stuffed Kinkawooka mussels. Beef cheek stifado, and crusty, tender, slow-roasted lamb shoulder.

Great choice for city catch-ups, office lunches, easy Greek dinner with a few drinks. Going back for more, which is always a good sign. The Bristol, 81 Sussex Street, Sydney www.thebristol.com.au

A SPOT OF RAINE: 40 RES

This is the most interesting new development in Sydney wine bars since Bar Copains opened just up the road. It’s small and modest (word of the month), yet there are proper wine glasses. It’s casual, yet serious. It’s welcoming, in its greeting and its insistence that you can do it your way, and not theirs. And it’s bloody delicious.

For six years, as head chef of Tetsuya’s, chef Josh Raine kept a low profile. He then became the inaugural chef-in-residence at Canvas, the extremely popular in-house restaurant at the Museum of Contemporary Art (my Good Food review here), ring-mastered by Melbourne hospitality guru, Bruce Keebaugh.

Having teamed up with fellow chef Michael Tran (The Bellevue, Clove Lane, and London’s Hibiscus, with the great Claude Bosi) under the auspices of Raine’s own company, A Spot of Raine, the pair opened Res 40 in Surry Hills this month, which opens three nights a week, Thursday to Saturday.

It’s like sitting in a Danish country cottage, with its wooden chairs and tables, white-washed walls, open window to the street, and dried herbs hanging from the rafters.

The menu leads with Sydney Rocks from Merimbula, beautifully treated with a smoky oily toasted rice vinaigrette. And coral trout fish fingers, crunchy and soft, to swipe through a lush pil pil sauce, an elegant version of the garlicky Basque emulsion.

I like the combined chefs’ palate: gamey, wild, peppery, oily, warm, creamy.

Casarecce e pepe is lovely, the twists of pasta cloaked with a peppery, cheesy spuma/foamy thing. It also appears that risotto is back in favour, flat on the plate, al dente, and studded with prawns. Top dish: Lightly cooked baby calamari with salt bush and pepperberry. Quick, call for the muscadet! (Jo Landron from La Haye-Fouassiere).

40 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills www.40res.com.au

PAVONI DOES MANLY: CIBARIA

Cibaria is many things: a pasticceria, osteria, gelateria, forneria (bakery), friggitoria (fried food stall), birreria (bar), bisteccheria (steak grill) and cafeteria, rolled into one.

That sounds like too much, and it is a bit frenetic, but it’s also such a relaxed way of eating that I think we can cope. “It’s like you’re in an Italian piazza” says everyone you meet at Cibaria, the latest lively and ambitious Italian from Alessandro and Anna Pavoni of Ormeggio, a’Mare and Postino.

You can walk in through the gelateria on the corner, or go into the Manly Pacific hotel entrance and work your way back through the bar. There are chefs, kitchens, grills, bars and bottles wherever you look, except for the long line of windows with its vista of pine trees and sea.

The menu is vast, and the primi piatti are especially good. Love the culaccia, a premium aged prosciutto from the rump, which I pair with a puffy pizza rossa with sweet cherry tomatoes melting intensely into it. So good. Fritto misto is sweet, subtle, seaside – exactly what you want when you want fritto misto.

Spaghetti puttanesca is big, with as much puttanesca sauce as pasta, and scottadito – grilled lamb chops – are fancied up, ristorante-style. I reckon they could do less, and edit a bit more. Give themselves a bit of a holiday by the sea, as well as us.

Exit through the gelateria, of course, for your choice of chef Victor Moya’s incredible gelati. Better still, go for my choice, the stracciatella - ricotta gelato with cocoa nibs. Manly Pacific Hotel, 55 North Steyne, Manly www.cibariamanly.au

THE NEW NEIGHBOURHOOD: OSTERIA MUCCA

You wait a long time for one of your favourite restaurant groups to open a new restaurant then all of a sudden, three come along at once. I love this idea, that started with the Continental Deli opening in Australia Street, Newtown in 2018, and just…grew.

We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s similar to what they did as the Porteno group in Holt Street, Surry hills with Porteno backing onto 121 BC wine bar (now private dining), adjacent to Humble Bakery and the Italian Bastardo.

Now, as Paisano & Daughters, they’re colonising the small terrace houses in this charming inner-west street, either side of the Continental. We now have Flora, for meat-free dining, and Mister Grotto, for seafood. I dropped in to the third new one, Osteria Mucca, in a former butcher’s shop that was home to the lovely 212 Blu café.

Elvis Abrahanowicz is on the grills tonight, working with Mucca head chef Janina Allande; Mikey Nicosian is at the door, and my old mate Esther is having a martini meeting on the sidewalk, so all is well with the world.

Top dish: Venetian baccalà mantecato, a whippy mix of salt cod, garlic and olive oil served on small rounds of toasted bread, topped with bottarga. No, wrong. Top dish is the whole grilled, boned mackerel, as sea-salty as the Japanese saba shioyaki, and just the best way to cook this fabulously oily fish.

A mosaic-like pressed terrine of coppa di testa is a bit too soft and shreddy, and pappardelle with chicken livers needs a re-think; the thin sauce doesn’t suit the pasta. But oh, the cassata! It’s a rococo little number from pastry chef Lauren Eldrige, of ricotta, sponge cake, chocolate and candied fruit that screams Siciliana. Mikey brings a Limoncello to finish. Of course he does.

All three restaurants are tiny, sweet and individual; as if a bunch of neighbours got together and just opened their own restaurants for the ’hood.

Love the light, the way the windows frames the street, the tiled walls, and the way everyone here is drinking wine (not cocktails), and talking, and hanging.

You can create a precinct, but can you create a neighbourhood? This says yes.

212 Australia Street, Newtown www.paisanoanddaughters.com.au

GREECE IS THE WORD: Bungalow 7 at Mantra

I’m currently planning a trip to Greece, so headed down to Manta at Woolloomooloo Wharf this week for some inspiration. Ntinos Fotinakis of Restaurant Bungalow 7 on the Athenian Riviera in Greece is in residence until April 6, and there’s word the place will transition to fully Greek over winter; which sounds like a good move.

Fotinakis plays with his food, but Greece still wins. He stuffs gyoza with spinach, rice, feta and mint, and it’s cute. He powers a glossy, off-white taramasalata with smoky yuzu, and it works; especially when topped with a spoonful of Uruguayan oscietra caviar. If you go, consider the beef tartare, rich and juicy, served with a kokkinisto-style tomato sauce that, again, works.

Good to hear Bill Drakopoulos of Sydney Restaurant Group, who bought Manta last year, wandering around saying: “Why haven’t we done this before?” After decades of opening some of the most successful Italian restaurants in Sydney, the family – all in the business – are embracing their heritage. That will work, too.

As always, the meze dishes win over the main courses, and as always at the Finger Wharf, dusk is magical and the city sky-line theatrical. Remind me why I’m planning a trip to Greece, again? 6/6 Cowper Wharf Roadway, Woolloomooloo www.mantarestaurant.com.au

POTTS POINT GETS GRUMPY: THE GRUMPY BAKER & BAR

The tiny, highly privileged, inner eastern suburb of Potts Point isn’t used to standing in a queue. Queuing makes them grumpy. But buying very good, dense sourdough bread, still warm, makes them less so.

What was the Macleay Street Bistro for 43 years is now the twelfth outlet of the Grumpy Baker chain, run by Israeli baker Michael Cthurmer and his family. This one is a happy mix of coffee window, inside and street dining, breakfast trays, night-time cocktails and hand-picked wines.

The lunchtime shakshuka is mighty, but having all the extras served on a bare metal tray makes me grumpy. Staff, by the way, are not grumpy at all, and do their best working within a non-intuitive interior design.

71A Macleay Street, Potts Point www.thegrumpybaker.com.au

NOW OPEN FOR DINNER: A.P. BREAD & WINE.

Have to love a place that you can drop into for breakfast, go back for a business meeting at dusk (thanks for hosting cocktails, Mr Kirky), then stay for dinner with your partner and have all the good things.

Again, there’s that sense of sticking-to-your-lane vision that’s shining through our new March entries to the scene. Dinner at a bakery should be built around bread, and it is. Love the celery Caesar salad, with land-of-the-giants croutons.

Half roast chicken with French onion soup toast is as excellent a collision of ideas on a plate as it sounds, as it pays homage to the trencherman’s meal of meat on a ‘plate’ of bread, the cooking juices dripping down to flavour and soften. Add kombu-crazy fries with onion aioli.

The sandstone room softens at night, there are some good round tables of four, and an outdoor terrace which, if we have any sense, we will take advantage of before the end of daylight savings on April 6. 32 Burton Street, Darlinghurst www.apbakery.com.au

---

Time to wrap it up for March. Thanks to everyone for joining me. Thanks again to Hugh Stewart for my portrait, and JD for the good pics (I did the bad ones). As previously stated, I’ll make a point of noting if and when I was hosted. And do let me know any restaurants you think the wider world should know about.

Hit the subscribe button below, you’ll get the next report in your inbox, last Friday of next month. Until then. Thanks, Terry.