Besha! Come home to SoCal. We miss you!
I've eaten food in the US on several occasions. None of them have been a positive experience.
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If Besha Rodell would love to find out then she must be prepared to travel a little away from downtown Sydney and the inner East. Those are the areas where style regularly triumphs over substance. Sydney is a big place measuring roughly 40 by 50 miles and the people don't live downtown.
The restaurateurs of the suburbs can't afford to decorate with style and so must use good food alone as their lure for hungry customers. Any visitor to Sydney should travel by bus or train in any direction you like and have a look around. Asian food of any variety is what Sydney does best and enclaves of excellence can be found all over the place.
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I have lived in 5 different countries and eaten everywhere from the local Fish and Chip shop to Osteria Francescana.
Sydney has one of the greatest varieties of cuisine in the world, and AMAZING food, if you know where to find it. Sure, it isn’t in a guide book or down the road from your hotel but it’s here.
I think your time would have been better spent researching Sydney’s more hidden away spots and shinning a spotlight on them. The lack of appreciation for these lesser known spots seems to be the core of criticism, you have a platform to change that.
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The only obvious L.A. style that the Sydney area follows at the moment is in spaghetti motorway development, compliments of the second caretaker state government without a mandate.
Among the other cosmo trends it has followed this decade, namely Hong Kong and NYC in 20th Century horizontal density, some sparsely fulfilled aspirations of Vancouver and Zurich, or the comparison default to the prouder American company and ethos — San Francisco, the official sister city — you may have to make a suggestion booking further down the new Metro tracks.
Forget Sydney - you need to come to Adelaide - food and wine rules here!
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I searched and searched for a decent meal in Sydney and couldn't find one that didn't include French fries. A person I was with ordered lasagna, and it was served on top of a pile of French fries.
Here are 4 great places off the top of my head, all are easily accessible via public transport and don’t serve French fries:
https://m.facebook.com/java.au?refsrc=https://www.facebook.com/pages/Randwick/Java-Restaurant/104586462909917&_rdr
http://www.cairotakeaway.com
https://m.facebook.com/Nom-Restaurant-1964820230470089/
http://www.sixpenny.com.au
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Sydney's food has been terrific for decades - I suspect you need a bit more research time.
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What a pithy assessment and excellent contrast of the two cities. I lived in Sydney until recently for three and a half years. I wholeheartedly agree that best restaurant lists almost without exception come with a high price point. And the distinction between good dining and cheap eats does seem arbitrary now.
As for the comments in this thread by tiddle: try being a little less defensive. It’s an astute observer’s view and it’s hard to disagree with the points being made.
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"During this visit I made sure to get to Baroo, the Korean-Californian-Nordic experiment of a restaurant..."
Notice to the writer: If you want authentic food, you should have avoided all these "fusion" thing. It's one of the dumbest thing to do.
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And if you want authentic Vietnamese food in Sydney, try Cabramatta. Their wet markets and stalls there are great too.
To the writer: Make sure you do that before disparaging Sydney as "not diverse enough" when you don't want to take the time to go outside your comfort zone, yet complaining about some all-white clientele in wealthy neighborhoods as if that's the only thing there is in Sydney. There is no "forced integration" in Sydney. For those who can't afford the very white North Shore, or the beautiful beaches in eastern suburbs, they move to inner west. Well, if you take the time to know more about Sydney, you would have known all of these, wouldn't you now.
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I'm always amazed by how these columnists who are meant to be independent-minded, yet they have to be taught that they should focus on the food (hey, that's you, food critic!), rather than just the environs and decor. In fact, in my area, the best Vietanmese pho is a stall inside a food court, and the best (and authentic) Indian food I've found, is a tiny shop run by two elderly sisters who provided homemade Indian fare. They are cheap, fresh, and authentic. That kind of authentic food will not be found in food columns or travel sites; you have to live it in order to find it.
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What do you mean by “authentic” food? I’ve yet to hear a satisfactory definition. BTW, Vietnamese food is about as fusion as you get.
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"Ask almost anyone who eats widely in the United States, and they’ll say that Los Angeles is the most exciting food city in America."
To call LA "the most exciting food city in America" is such a hyperbole. And, I find this article's writing and the understanding of the two cities rather shallow. Apart from lots of sunshine, I find little, if any, commonalities between Sydney and LA. This writer's idea of "Sydney" is very limited in scope, and the writer does not look to venture too far outside the few handful of places that "American" expats might hang out. Should the writer visit other suburbs, he should realize how diverse the scenes are. (Try Newtown, for example.)
Such writing is a disservice for anyone who doesn't know Sydney.
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@tiddle I'm an American who lives in Sydney and has spent loads of time in LA. Sydney is unmistakably LA-esque. I often talk to people who, when they realize I'm an American living here having moved from San Francisco, like to tell me how much Sydney is like SF. I swiftly point how much more similar Melbourne is to SF and Sydney to LA. The column is bang on and the columnist is correct about the Sydney food scene... full disclosure, I write for local magazines about food and review bars and restaurants.
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@Jess, You might write for local magazines, but that doesn't mean you know the local whereabouts. Sydneysiders and Melbourne folks like to compare themselves to US cities because they long to be in the league of first-class cities. (Yes, you'll be surprised how aussies follow the US politics more closely than most americans do.) Like I said, if you care to go local, to where all the suburbs are (not just where all the expats go), you'll see a very different scene and experience a lot more "authentic" restaurants than these overpriced "fusion" phenom that caters for people like yourself and tourists who don't know better.
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@ tiddle nyc
I think it is very difficult to name "the most exciting food city in America", a country of the hamburger-with-ketchup and tasteless vegetables eaten with the hands.
My favourite food in Sydney is Japanese, Lebanese and Chinese.
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To be able to access this site, I had to go through four tests of clicking on frames with bicycles, motorcycles cross-walks, and traffic lights.
Now I can write, what bothers me in this article by Ms. Rowell. It praises "diversity", a catch-word of the politically correct leftist radical Democratic food critics, who love to see various incompatible ingredients mixed in the courses.
I beseech you, think not that complexity makes a good cuisine, but purity and simplicity do. As an extreme, do not mix the food of Greenland Eskimos with that of the Tierra del Fuego indigens.
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I haven't visited Sydney in years but having returned to Melbourne after 4 years in Nor Cal I agree about service at Australian eateries and the fact that even in Melbourne there's too much focus on venue style than good food (in teen speak, too many restaurants are 'try-hards')... I will however give my homeland one advantage over the US: coffee!
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Maybe if Australia could find anyone in the service industry who understands that customers want service, that'd be a start. I've just spent two weeks in Australia with 14 executives, a few of whom are Aussies. We did not have ONE meal where an issue with service did NOT arise. Coffees taking 20 minutes to arrive, wrong orders delivered and expressions of incredulity that we, the customers, actually knew what we'd ordered, corrections to pronunciation (incorrect corrections in quite a few cases, closing a buffet one minute after time (10.01am in this case, after having stood at the counter playing with her phone), and many others (five guys walk into a bar at 10.45pm and the barman says he's closing - why do owners allow this?). The only good service we got was from an Irish backpacker serving at a Belgian beer joint. Coffee shop staff were the worst - extremely snobby about requiring patrons to go to the counter to place another order, then not having a clue about the coffee they're serving (Yrgacheffe is NOT in Kenya...). All 14 of us decided that, if given the chance to move to Oz, this aspect of Australia's culture would keep us well away from the place (among others, but that's a separate set of issues). Great food served by arrogant oiks is no longer great food.
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@Neil Some countries, e.g., France, have a tradition of service. Others, e.g., the U.S., have tipping to incentivize it. Australia has neither. On top of that, we’ve started reading our own press clippings, and not just about restaurants.
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@Neil Most people working in the hospitality industry are likely to be just students or working holiday makers who try to make their ends meet... Very few are super passionate about providing impeccable services. And they are probably getting way under paid and stressed under snobby managers. So don't stress when they don't give you a customised service. It's the customers who need to chill.
For starters you should have avoided the overpriced downtown tourist traps, the Belgian bit was a giveaway. Then there's the 10 am curfew which sounds like the dining room of a big hotel where most customers eat early. Hotel dining rooms should be avoided world wide.
The trick to successful eating out anywhere is to learn to play the local game. If you want breakfast then head for Surry Hills where you will find 20 or so cafes whose quality hovers between excellent and superb. The area is right near Central Station so not too far. All of them will serve better food than a buffet and right up to noon or later.
By the way, morning coffee places rarely have waiters. You pay in advance, the barista yells your order and you go up to collect it. Situation normal.
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As someone who has lived most of her 63 years in Los Angeles, I can tell you that LA has had a good "food scene" for longer than you have experienced. Traffic and sprawl are problems and contribute to LAs reputation as a cultural wasteland, but that's only on the surface. Unfortunately, it takes a little finesse to find and get to good places, but it's very doable.
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I was recently in LA briefly for the first time in years. Not my favorite place. Felt lucky I only got stuck in horrible traffic once.
We ate at Gjelina, the Georgian Hotel, 'West' at the Angeleno Hotel and at the cafe at the Getty Center. The food was always thoughtful, fresh, well prepared and unique. I neither expected or sought out such a wonderful culinary experience, but there it was.
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Can I say. Go to the suburbs and don't focus too much on the city. I can eat in any Chinese or Korean province in my local suburb. I can eat Thai as good as anything I've eaten in Thailand, nearby. The local Indian restaurant is a focal point for the Pakistan Cricket team every time they come to Sydney. What's more its cheap.
I wouldn't focus on the glitzy dining rooms too much, for most the locals that might be somewhere for a special occasion.
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@Algernon These all sound great - what are the names of these places?
Gollygosh Michael, if you are in Sydney then you should be telling us. I can tell you that the Indian cricket team always eat at Surjit's in Annandale. There are pictures on the wall to prove it.
@Michael AJ's Indian on Balaclava Road, Rowe Street in Eastwood for Korean and Chinese.
There’s definitely a lot of restaurant snobbery here among certain groups. My in-laws love telling everyone about their last visit to Jacques Raymond, how much it cost and how it wasn’t as good as it usually is (a kind of humble brag to let you know they can afford to be ‘regulars’ and that they are very discerning). But, fortunately there is a thriving cafe culture here in Melbourne and various culinary enclaves created by different waves of migrants, especially Italian, Greek, Vietnamese and Chinese. Mexican is not really a strong style here because their aren’t many people from Mexico to share their cuisine. Do we have a distinctive style? I’m not sure. But, all Aussies know that you can’t beat a BBQ at home, in a park or on a beach.
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" I wish Sydney, and Australia, judged its restaurants purely on the power of deliciousness and less on glittery dining rooms and high-rent real estate."
So do I, in Sydney, Canberra or anywhere.
We go out to eat - different cuisines; different cooks; different moods. Sometimes for the good service, such as being recognised by the maitre d' or other staff.
NOT - for concrete floors that magnify noise levels.
Not for expensive decor.
Not anything following a food "fad".
Not for tables squashed together.
Not for views - you can't eat the view that is an excuse to charge very high prices.
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One of the problems with Sydney developing an identity is that it is always looking toward someplace else. Other Australian cities compare themselves to Sydney, but it wouldn't think of returning the favor. It's "Sydney and the bush" to them.
But it does have its eyes turned constantly toward overseas centers. Sydneysiders evaluate themselves by how they compare to London and New York or, more precisely, their sometimes inaccurate conceptions of such cities.
Now that the author of this article has provided them with another standard, they will no doubt be adding LA to the list.
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@ERP
I think the issue is more that Sydney is too much like London and New York, places that are hyper diverse but with a distinct hierarchy concerning the types of restaurants that are prized and promoted (French always on top).
Jonathan Gold, the influential food critic of LA, more or less, doesn’t distinguish between them. A Korean restaurant in a strip mall was just as worthy of a full write-up as the new French restaurant in Beverly Hills. No type of restaurant was singled out from inclusion from his 101 Best Restaurants list, as long as what was on the plate was good. He helped set the blueprint for how Angelenos approach their food scene. LA is a unique food city in that the chef-owner at a taco truck is at the same level of competition (or comraderie) with the michelin-starred chef of a tasting menu restaurant, even as they serve different clientele and exist in different scenes. Every chef raises their game, and LA’s incomparable food scene flourishes from that.
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