Sydney food trends which shaped dining scene over the past decade
It was a decade that saw Sydney’s dining scene change for the better and the worst, ranging from great new food additions to the rise of the Instagram diner. We look back on the best and worst dining trends over the past 10 years.
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It was a decade that saw Sydney’s dining scene change for the better — with many welcome developments and sensational restaurants — and for worse with wage scandals and the rise of the Insta-diner.
We look back on the trends that shaped our dining decade.
BEST TRENDS
TRUCKS
The arrival of these glorious grease-wagons coincided with another trend — the “burgers, sliders and fries” of American diner cuisine.
And few people encapsulated both like Gee Ozgen and his wife Kat, whose Mister Gee’s Burger Truck was, for a time, one of the hottest tickets in town.
“It was kind of like being a rock star,” said Ozgen, who remembers pulling up the shutters on his truck to see queues of hungry customers snaking down the street.
“It just pure adrenaline and excitement. We would serve all these people and there would be great music playing and everyone just eating and hanging out. It was such a buzz.”
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However a grease fire last year crashed their food truck dream. The couple is now working out of temporary pop-up digs in North Strathfield, while their truck is restored in time to hit the road again in 2020.
VEGAN INVASION
Sydney’s pre-eminent vegetarian chef Brent Savage, who switched his acclaimed Potts Point eatery Yellow to an entirely vegetarian menu back in 2016, said over the past five years the plant-based food trend has “exploded”.
BRUNCH
Much of the credit for this belongs to The Grounds of Alexandria, a food phenomenon in its own right since it opened in 2012.
Surrounded by a stunning labyrinth of hanging gardens, organic fruits and vegetables and, of course, a pig pen, the venue helped pioneer a brunch resurgence across Sydney.
LOBSTER ROLLS
Sydneysiders might think we are eating lobster but what we have been scoffing — while delicious — is actually crayfish.
For real lobster you needed to go to the Northern Hemisphere. But, thanks to the great Americanisation of the Sydney food scene in the past 10 years, real lobster — albeit frozen and imported — has become an unlikely trend.
Now as ubiquitous as cheeseburgers, lobster rolls are part of most pub menus with fast-food giant Betty’s Burgers even adding one to their menu last year.
TOMAHAWK STEAKS
For some reason, Sydneysiders decided they wanted to eat a steak that could double as a weapon.
Enter the tomahawk steak, a cut of beef ribeye that has around six inches of extra rib bone for presentation, which has found its way onto menus across the city — perhaps as an antidote to the vegan movement.
NATIVE FOOD
Inspired by the Danish foraging movement that rocked the food world, Aussie chefs got creative this decade with Australian native ingredients.
All of a sudden things like wattleseed, paperbark, rosella fruits and Kakadu plums were being mixed into dumplings, stirred through pastas, added to sauces and even blended into cocktails.
FROSE
It’s not known who decided to freeze rose wine and serve it from a Slurpee machine but the birth of Frose in Sydney surely became one of the social markers of the decade.
The freezing and highly intoxicating beverage reached peak Zeitgeist when — according to the eastern suburbs set — Roxy Jacenko sent fresh-out-of-prison husband Oliver Curtis to North Bondi Fish to buy the frose machine. Denied by management, Curtis had to make do with a giant takeaway tub full of the stuff instead.
FARM TO TABLE
This was the decade that diners were not satisfied unless they could see their meal pulled from a garden while they sipped their aperitifs.
Indeed the farm-to-table trend took hold in a big way as restaurants commissioned their own urban gardens to furnish their increasingly seasonal menus. Matt Moran’s Chiswick helped pioneer the trend while others followed suit.
DESIGNER PUB
Or this could be better described as the “death of the counter meal”. In the past decade pubs and hotels across Sydney have all but done away with the bain-marie and chip fryer.
In their place are award-winning, fine dining restaurants (The Newport), pizza joints worthy of a place on the Amalfi Coast (The Dolphin) and glorious casual bistros where things like heirloom tomatoes, roast chickens and fresh oysters are de rigueur (The Tilbury, Hotel Centennial and Tottis to name a few). And to think we used to be content with a cup of popcorn.
REBIRTH OF THE ROOTY
It was as unlikely as it was unexpected. That great gaming monolith of Western Sydney was renamed West HQ and now offers pizzas by Italian food legend Stefano Manfredi, a steak and oyster restaurant from Sean Connolly and a Chinese offering from the team behind China Doll, to name just a few.
WORST TRENDS
INSTAGRAMMERS
Just put the phone down and eat. No one wants to see seven photos of a poke bowl.
DESIGNER MILKSHAKES
A brief and sickly social media hit now, thankfully, forgotten.
RAINBOW FOOD
As above.
KALE
They said it tasted like spinach. They lied.
ACAI
Lurid purple berries that infected breakfasts.
ZOODLES AND OTHER VEGIE NOODLES
Shaved raw parsnip? Nope.
SMASHED AVO
Invented by Boomers. Appropriated by Millennials.
SPEAK-EASY BARS
Can we just enjoy a drink in the 2020s, not 1920s?
UNISEX BATHROOMS
Never. Ever.