THINGS JUST GOT SPICY.

April has been hot with openings, from curry laksa to kosha mangsho. Nose = runs.

No, I’m not talking about KFC’s new drop of Habanero Hot & Crispy. I’m talking about spice shining loud and clear through so much of the food this month. The goat curry at a bright new Bengali restaurant with a social enterprise agenda; the aglio, olio e peperoncino at a Negroni-fuelled Italian, and the curry laksa at an old Sydney favourite given a new lease of life.

The trouble with a good curry is that half way through it, you realise that there is no point in eating food that isn’t curry. I’m just not interested in dinner unless there’s a chance of a superficial burn.

My nose has been running the Stawell Gift since the beginning of April. (I noticed the actual Stawell Gift winner said he was going to celebrate that evening with KFC. Ha!)

No surprises, then, that the month’s cocktail consumption has gone off the charts. There must be some scientific correlation between being able to handle progressively hotter forms of chilli, and progressively stronger forms of alcohol. That thought led me to further research, at the opening of a new precinct called The Collective, in The Rocks, and at a new shrine to Campari-fuelled Negroni called Conte.

At home, I’ve been turning everything into curry. When Jill cooked a fabulous pork belly roast for Easter, I kept thinking as I was eating it that it would be so much better as a curry. (And it was, the next day).

Then I accidentally came home from the fish market with a big mud crab. Who needs Habanero Hot & Crispy, when you’ve got Terry’s Singaporean chilli crab? (As taught to me by the woman who ran the chili crab stall at Newton Circus in Singapore.)

AN OLD FRIEND IS BACK: THE MALAYA.

Three generations grew up with The Malaya in Sydney - and three generations of the owners have grown up with it too. That’s a LOT of salt-and-pepper prawns.

So a big welcome (and welcome back) to the new Malaya which moved into Grosvenor Square this month, right where the oesophagus of George Street narrows at the throat of The Rocks. The original owner’s grandchildren, Duan and Isabella Wong have installed the new Malaya in what was once Neil Perry’s excellent Rosetta. It’s big – very big – and the menu is a list of old favourites spruced up for a city outing.

The best thing I tried was the chicken and prawn mixed laksa; a HUGE bath of it, with good noodles (one sort only), good chicken, two fat prawns, and those wonderful fried tofu puffs that are like eating kitchen sponges, in a good way. Lovely droplets of chilli, like lily pads on the pond of creamy coconut soup, are just enough to make your nose run.

Everyone orders pork satay, the spring rolls are good, and the curries are rich and dark. My roti was crisp, but had the life pressed out of it. There are stronger Singaporean and Malaysian restaurants around, but the obvious affection for this place from everyone in the room is just the best.

225 George Street, Sydney. themalaya.com.au

OH, KOLKATA! KOLKATA SOCIAL

Young chef Ahana Dutt has joined forces with the unstoppable ball of energy that is Shaun Christie-David of Plate It Forward, which underwrites Colombo Social, Kyiv Social and Kabul Social. She’ll be deploying her expertise across the board, but right now she’s busy setting up the kitchen at Kolkata Social in King Street, Newtown, and it’s fabulous.

Born in Bengal, Dutt goes beyond popular Indian dishes to explore the flavours that thread through Bengali cuisine from the east coast of India – fenugreek, the bitterness of mustard seeds, saffron, cumin, ginger, panch phoron (a Bengali five-spice blend). Lentils coconut, rice.

Loved the dry chilli chicken starter, bitey with garlic and green chilli, like chicken nuggets from The Dark Side. The kosha mangsho (goat curry) is mighty, not highly spiced but deeply flavoured, and cooked on the bone, coated in deep, rich gravy with big chunks of potato. Dal with tomatoes and celery seeds is textural and gentle. Ahana cooks fish beautifully: barramundi is fried in mustard oil and served with a saffron-gold, smoked yoghurt sauce, thick and creamy, and crying out for rice.

The vodka-spiced lassi (!) is pretty good, too. And the mini mustard martini. And the Kolkata lager, made for the restaurant by Mountain Culture Brewing.

Food is served warm rather than hot; the breads are lovely, and all dishes go so well with each other, it doesn’t really matter what you order.

Couples can sit up at the kitchen counter, groups out the back. The kitchen is tiled and tanned, the front dining room pure Bengali blue. It’s pretty noisy – wooden floors, wooden walls, loud people like me – but that feels right.

As with all Plate it Forward venues, Kolkata Social provides jobs and training for asylum seekers, refugees and other marginalised groups, and also collaborates with global grass-roots organisations to provide meals to those who need them most.

If you order the set menu (or vegan set menu), the cost also pays for a meal that will get to someone in Kolkata who is in need. It’s a great incentive to settle in and make a meal of it – for you and for someone else.

528 King Street, Newtown plateitforward.org.au/kolkatasocial/

COMMUNITY SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: The potato chips at the tiny new Tailor bar (it used to be a cloak room) are extremely fine, snappy-crisp, and salty. They may as well hang them on the end of a fishing line and reel me in. It’s the first stop you should make at The Collective (next).

THE MORE THE MERRIER: THE COLLECTIVE

Sydney is getting better at inhabiting the skin of its own history – the sandstone walls, the gantried piers, the cobbled laneways. It used to feel awkward when bars and restaurants pushed in and put up their buntings, covering history. But when it’s done properly, it’s totally charming, e.g. Lana and Grana at an 1860s woolstore (Hinchcliff House), Le Foote in an old pub in The Rocks, Saint Peter in an old pub in Paddington.

Walk into the 199 year old, heritage-listed Argyle Stores (long the home of The Argyle nightclub), and it doesn’t feel like there are four restaurants and nine bars and lounges in the building and its surrounds; they’re swallowed up, allowed to just be there, waiting to be discovered.

Hunter Street Hospitality has installed a one-size-fits-all, easy-going but elegant menu across two floors of the main building (The Dining Room), and colonised the outdoor spaces (The Gardens), with coffee counters and bars that go from breakfast to midnight. They’ve roped in their own adjacent restaurants The Cut, and Sake, to form The Collective, a new precinct that is aiming high. Not only are they spending some big ones to get there, they’re throwing not one, or two or three chefs at it, but four.

Spice Temple’s Andy Evans, Sake’s Shimpei Hatanaka, and Rockpool’s Santiago Aristizabal, wrangled by (when he’s not herding cats in his spare time) executive chef Mike Flood, are giving the old wool store a new lease of life with everything from crab omelettes and seafood towers, to MB9+ wagyu and tomahawk steaks.

And that little bar I mentioned, Tailor? That’s the If You Know, You Know space within the golden walls – where all the cocktails are named for textural fabrics, e.g. the gin-based Silk weaves coconut, rose geranium and sandalwood into something that goes down strong but smooth.

Thanks to hosts, Hunter Street CEO Frank Tucker and John Sullivan, and Savannah’s Brooke Burns for the invite to raise a glass on opening night. 12-18 Argyle Street, The Rocks thecollectiverocks.com.au

EAT AT JOE’S: JOE’S TABLE.

In 2024, I reviewed a corner Thai restaurant that had opened on busy William Street, and suggested we all ‘eat at Joe’s’. When I found myself wandering the streets, hungry and craving curry after cutting short a visit to an over-hyped new joint that shall remain nameless, I took my own advice.

Joe Kitsana cooks a simple menu of personal, home-cooked Thai dishes while simultaneously delivering them to tables, opening BYO bottles and pouring wine, and taking bookings on his phone. Have the floppy prawn dumplings, floating like friendly manta rays in a lightly chilli, tangy sauce; and a red curry of bbq duck with snake beans and sweet basil, and maybe a gentle, soupy bowl of steamed ruby snapper with coconut milk, fresh herbs and makrut lime leaves. Good advice, Terry. Glad I took it.

1/185 A Bourke St, Darlinghurst Sydney For bookings, SMS 0452 429 855.

ON THE RIGHT TRACK: ARCHIE ROSE STICKY BEAK FESTIVAL

The partly elevated Goods Line that runs from Railway Square to Darling Harbour is, if you squint a bit, just like New York’s famous High Line.

Cheers to Archie Rose for taking it on as a new venue for their annual Sticky Beak Festival of good food and booze and music. A mate of mine makes it happen and sent tickets (thanks @ninavsnina), the weather behaved itself, and the night went off with plenty of smoke and sizzle.

Hola to Ho Jiak (shown), Takam, Kiln, Lankan Filling Station, Firepop and Flora; and P&V, PS40, Double Deuce and the Waratah; and FBi Radio for the live acts and DJs. Not that I stayed past my bedtime; instead I raced home with boxes of Ho Jiak char kway teow and chicken satay, and Andy Bowdy’s pineapple turnover, and raised a can of Archie Rose’s new Whisky and Dry Ginger Beer to the stayers. archierose.com.au

V IS FOR VITO: CLARENCE & V.

Vito has this way of loping up to you and settling in, with a ‘what’s happenin’. He and Tommaso ran a skinny little Darlo café called Parmalat, then Latteria, from 1994 to 2013, where I was a regular, so I heard that ‘what’s happenin’ a lot. Then he loped off to London for a few years, and now he’s back, with an idea for a classic, easy, indoor/outdoor European café on Clarence Street in the city.

Young chef Stella Roditis (Bar Vincent and 10 William Street) turns her hand to everything from breakfast platters to pasta and salad lunches to comfort food Italian for dinner, and the walls are gradually being colonised by art in all its forms – including mate Shaun Gladwell’s can’t-look-away video works. Lope in some time - it’s no fuss, very friendly, decently priced, great for meeting a pal for lunch, and closes at 9pm. It’s what’s happenin’. 2/191 Clarence Street, Sydney. instagram.com/clarenceandv

THE HOUSE THAT NEGRONI BUILT: CONTE

Gotta love a dedicated Negroni bar. The sweet, buzzy little Bar Conte in Surry Hills opened in 2021 and instantly became a destination bar for having no less than thirty different Negronis.

Now Raffaele Lombardi and Victoria Hampshire, with chef Steven de Vecchi, have escalated things with Conte, in Clarence Street. They sure know how to create an atmosphere. The bar is delightful, with lots of small tables for two and stools by the back-lit bar. But then, wow, it’s a full-on, dedicated Italian restaurant, spinning as fast as its trusty Berkel slicer can cut through fine mortadella and prosciutto San Daniele.

The best thing? Every table throughout the restaurant has a Negroni on it. Including my own. The interiors are swell; heavy draped windows, action-packed kitchen, wall of wine, wonderful lighting, crimson highlights, luxurious banquettes.

The gent at the next table leans over and says “What does this remind you of?” I couldn’t guess. “Beppi’s,” he says, referring to Darlinghurst’s venerable Italian, with tables dotted throughout its bottle-lined cellars. “It’s so like Beppi’s.”

We shared a platter of salumi with crisp pane carasau, a bowl of fritto misto that included whitebait with calamari and school prawns, and a very good bucatino (I love bucatino when you can suck air through it as if it were a straw), rolled in aglio, olio e peperoncino with golden fried panko breadcrumbs. This place is going to be a scene. 151 Clarence Street, Sydney barconte.com.au

Time to wrap it up, with a few more April moments - my favourite Easter eggs (N25 Kaluga Caviar); a sunny day at the Boathouse in Rose Bay for brunch and a beer, and a birthday dinner at Neptune’s Grotto for Curly Spice (long story, but we once played “If you were a Spice Girl, what would your name be?” with a group of reprobates. Now she’s Curly Spice, and I’m Old Spice.)

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Thanks for joining me, thanks to Hugh Stewart for my Terry Durack Eats portrait, and to JD for the good pics (I did the bad ones), and to Kirky for the mesmerising pic of Vito and Stella at Clarence & V. As always, it’s noted if and when I have been hosted. And let me know any restaurants you think the wider world should know about, below in comments, or to terry@terrydurack.com.

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