The Mouth: Luke’s Table at the Pylon Lookout of the Sydney Harbour Bridge requires guests to climb 200 stairs but is the view and food worth it?

Climb the 200 steps up the Sydney Harbour Bridge to chef Luke Mangan’s restaurant, and you’re met with a glass of bubbles for your troubles. This is literally high end dining. Does it stack up?

Chef Luke Mangan greets diners with a drink after they have climbed the 200 stairs. Picture: Jeremy Piper

So there we were standing at the bottom of the southeast pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, faced with a terrible proposition: Climb 200 steps, get a great meal and view.

The idea seemed a little ironic if not daunting: That’s something like 17 floors, Google told us, which didn’t sound like a lot of fun.

But then! Inspiration struck. Surely, we’ve conquered this sort of thing before?

Another quick Google revealed that it’s 463 steps to the top of Florence’s Duomo, which we’ve climbed at least once without ever seeing the inside of an Italian cardiac ward.

Now, like John Bradfield’s bridge, Filippo Brunelleschi’s Duomo was a great engineering marvel of its age. Its first of its kind double-dome hexagon construction put Florence on the map while bringing its citizens closer to God.

Bradfield didn’t have quite such lofty goals: While the Bridge may have quickly become a universal symbol of Sydney, his ambitions extended only to bringing Sydneysiders closer to Cremorne.

The Luke Mangan restaurant The Pylon Lookout on the Sydney Harbour Bridge requires guests to climb over 17 flights of stairs. Photo Jeremy Piper

The Mouth was encouraged by the experience of climbing the stairs at Florence’s famous Duomo to tackle Luke Mangan’s restaurant. Getty Images

Even so, it is an object of reverence, a sort of secular temple to pagan Sydney’s feared and revered god of Infrastructure who demands much sacrifice and promises much abundance in return.

And at the top, not Vasari’s frescoes illustrating the Last Judgement, but Sydney chef Luke Mangan’s latest project – a pop up for 20 where all the gear, tables, chairs, food, booze, equipment, has to be hauled up and down every night.

Talk about mortification of the flesh.

It’s one of those things that to the cynic sounds a bit gimmicky (how good can the food be under such circumstances? Answer: Very).

At the top, Luke greets guests with a glass of rose bubbles. The vibe is all fun dinner party with the best views in town.

Mangan greets guests at The Pylon Lookout restaurant. Photo Jeremy Piper

Dinner party with a view. Photo Jeremy Piper

Other guests mill around the top of the pylon, checking out whatever cruise ship is down below and figuring out where their house is, chomping oysters and little pea tartlets.

The menu is necessarily as make-ahead as possible but (again, lesson for aspiring hosts out there) that’s not a bad thing. Nor is it a million fiddly courses, for pretty obvious reasons.

In a city with even more raw kingfish dishes than Josper grills, a Thai-ish take with plum and lime and nam jim and a coconut not-quite-foam is bright and refreshing.

The food prep at Luke’s Table. Photo Jeremy Piper

A massive slab of Shimo beef, presumably seared off site before the sous vide treatment, we found plate-lickingly good.

We also enjoyed the puffed rice bubbles that sat atop a sort of yuzu custard, mostly because they reminded us of a guilty childhood pleasure of eating dry cereal straight out of the box while watching The Brady Bunch.

Not quite heaven, but in Sydney we take what we can get.

Luke’s Table costs $345pp and is currently sold out until February 2024.

-The Mouth is an undercover food critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.