From fresh bread galore to leather aprons, we check out the hot culinary trends across Sydney
With Australia being one of the front-runners when it comes to foodie trends, The Honeycombers’ Founder Chris was sure to keep an eye out for the latest culinary happenings during her recent shortbreak in Sydney. Read on for what she found as she ate her way around the city…
Artisan Yeast
It used to be coffee, but now every corner (well, almost) is the ‘artisan bakery’. Breadfern (in Redfern – like what they’ve done there), The Sourdough, The Pain Shop; it seems it’s not the boutique coffee shops taking over town, it’s actually the boutique bakeries that can make a mean espresso. This trend is also continued throughout fine dining restaurants, with many of them baking breads inhouse. We hope this trend travels north!
Paired back everything
No high brow locations. No table clothes. No high-end menus. No fancy dish descriptions. The chefs of Sydney are paring back on everything, and focusly soley on food quality. And we’re not complaining. It does mean that you might need to travel to a more industrial area for Sydney’s best restaurant experience – like Ester in the grungy inner city Chippendale neighbourhood; voted Sydney’s Best New Restaurant 2014 by The Good Food Guide. There’s also a chance that you might not know exactly what you’re eating – often the description of the dishes are now the three key ingredients. But that’s ok – when it tastes that good, we’ll forgive the secrecy.
Sharing plates
Sydney is going nuts for shared plates. At our last count, nine out of ten waiters introduced the menu with: “This menu is designed to be shared…”. From where we’re standing, sharing dishes is a great way to avoid food envy. However, we did over hear another diner saying: “I just want my own meal again!”
Free sparkling water
Yippppeeee! Who else is tired of large water bills when you dine? We were thrilled to see a number of high-end restaruants in Sydney offering free filtered and sparkling water. While the sparkling was aerorated in-house, this is one dining trend we need to seed in Singapore, ASAP.
Leather aprons
The fresh-faced (and generally good-looking) servers of Sydney not only tend to know their stuff and deliver in over-service (no complaints so far), it seems that it’s very cool to wear a full bib apron with leather straps. What’s with that?! We’re not sure whether it’s meant to hides tatts and short-shorts or keep the chest hair out of the pasta, but Sydney-siders seem to dig it.
We’d like to thank Qantas and Destination NSW for hosting Chris on her recent trip to Sydney and the Blue Mountains. You definitely made her just a little more homesick for her hometown of Sydney.
