Double Bay’s Bay Street continues its growing claim as the Rodeo Drive of Sydney restaurants with the arrival this week of builders to work on a slick new Japanese restaurant and bar. The strip is already home to Neil Perry’s high-end Margaret and his soon-to-arrive Asian eatery and jazz bar.

The yet-to-be-named 140-seat Japanese eatery is the latest venture by Eddie Levy and Adam Abrams, of nearby Matteo. “We’re excited about broadening our footprint in the area we’ve both grown up in,” Levy says.

The duo plan to open two doors up the hill from their buzzy Italian restaurant just in time for summer. The Japanese bar will have its own “speakeasy”-style entrance.

Bay Street has ridden the ups and bumps of the suburb’s fortunes over the decades, but we may be in a period of positive trajectory. California-based luxury home furnisher RH (formerly Restoration Hardware) has lodged a development application to open a five-level venue topped by a rooftop restaurant at 19-27 Bay Street. It’s slated for completion by 2025.

Perry’s Asian eatery, Song Bird, looks as if it will arrive in April 2024. It’ll be in a Neville Gruzman-designed building on the corner of Bay and Cooper streets and will include Perry’s bar, Bobbie’s. Perry has partnered with the bar tsar behind New York’s award-winning Dante, Australian-born Linden Pride.

Perry has long believed in Double Bay’s potential, even during its lull following its cinema closure and while Westfield Bondi Junction was luring shoppers away. He opened Margaret in 2021 on Bay Street, then added the more modest spin-off eatery Next Door and Baker Bleu bakery opposite the tree-edged Guilfoyle Square.

“It’s a true village at the throat of the eastern suburbs,” the chef says. “It even has its own microclimate. The wind can be howling [in Sydney], but get down here and it’s beautiful and calm.”

Perry predicts RH will draw people from “all over Australia”. “There’s the Japanese restaurant and two more restaurant spaces, and we’ll be across the street with the Asian and the jazz bar downstairs.”