When chef Claire Van Vuuren announced the crispy polenta chips with creamy gorgonzola sauce were coming off the menu after 13 years at Newtown restaurant Bloodwood, the response was fierce.

Customers yelled at Van Vuuren from across the street, accosted her in the restaurant’s open kitchen and took to social media to lament the “tragedy”.

“Who would have thought that taking one dish off the menu could upset so many people?” Van Vuuren says.

“We don’t want to just be known as the polenta-chip restaurant.”

A restaurant’s signature dish is, most often, decided by diners within days of its menu debut. At hatted CBD restaurant Ragazzi Wine and Pasta, executive chef Scott McComas-Williams “had an inkling” that the house-made sourdough toast slathered with a deeply umami butter and topped with a curled Cantabrian anchovy ($7) would prove a winning combination.

“It became a signature dish pretty much straight away. Every single person was ordering it and so many of them were popping it on their socials,” says McComas-Williams.

“But signature dishes are a funny thing. When you’re conceptualising a menu it isn’t really something you think about.

“If you could just come up with your signature dish, wouldn’t you apply that strategy to everything on your menu?”

Whether the dishes are simple, as in the case of Ragazzi’s anchovy toast, or elaborate, as with the boneless rib-eye at two-hatted Bondi Beach restaurant Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, they tend to have one thing in common: when they first appear on the menu, they’re unique.

“Back in 2009 there weren’t many restaurants serving polenta chips, so if you wanted them you came to Bloodwood,” says Van Vuuren.

When Icebergs’ former head chef Karen Martini first introduced the boneless rib-eye, it was one of the first restaurants to remove the channel fat. That factor, combined with the steak’s signature salted crust (only achievable using a specifically shaped iron grill that had to be saved from landfill), has kept the dish on the menu for more than 20 years.

“At the time it was almost unheard of,” says current head chef Alex Prichard.

“To this day, I haven’t seen another restaurant do it. There’s a very real cost to it, and it’s quite time-consuming.”

Over the years the recipe has evolved as new chefs have come on board. When working on a collaborative dinner with Victor Churchill in Melbourne, Icebergs chef Anthony Puharich stepped up to put his own spin on the signature.

Instead of glueing the spinalis back onto the meat after removing the channel fat (as done by former executive chef Monty Koludrovic), Puharich elected to completely remove both.

“It ended up being the best one ever,” says Prichard.

“You get this pure, unadulterated flavour of beef.”

Prichard says the steak, alongside Martini’s gamberetti (sidenote: did you know the prawn heads were originally removed to prevent injury to artificially inflated lips?), will never leave the Icebergs menu.

“When you have a restaurant that’s 20 years old, people have created really important life moments here,” he explains.

“They’ve gone on their first date here, gotten married here, celebrated anniversaries here … And that food they ate holds memories. It’s really quite beautiful.”

But not all dishes make the cut. Prichard’s wife stopped talking to him for a week after he removed the squid ink and crab spaghetti from the menu.

“You have to let things move organically. You don’t take something off the menu for the sake of it, you do it because you feel like you’ve gotten to a better point,” Prichard says.

It’s a sentiment that resonates with Van Vuuren.

“It’s flattering when someone loves a dish you make, but … food trends change, and we didn’t want to be constrained to cooking the same thing,” she says.

“The polenta chips have big shoes to fill, but they’ve been replaced by some pretty incredible dishes.”