Five years after chef Martin Benn closed the doors on his award-winning Sydney restaurant Sepia to work on the opening of the swanky Society eatery in Melbourne, he’s back.

Maybe not back on the pans full-time in the harbour city, but Benn’s imprint is all over the menu at Sydney Common, which opens on Tuesday, February 6.

“I’m mentoring, I’ve always enjoyed the teaching aspect of the job,” Benn says. The onetime head chef at Tetsuya’s and Sepia has found himself a protege with a pretty polished CV himself.

Sydney Common head chef Jamie Robertson has worked at Michelin-starred London restaurant The Capital, as well as hatted Chippendale restaurant Ester.

Benn tried to hire Robertson to work at Society, then COVID scotched Robertson’s plans to relocate to Melbourne. But the duo have spent the past couple of months working together on the Sydney Common menu, and planning how to birth a restaurant in the Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park, which hasn’t exactly sung gastronomically since Dietmar Sawyere cooked there in the 1990s.

“Sydney does have that reluctance with hotel restaurants,” Robertson says. Benn points to the prestige of training in and wide use of hotel restaurants in cities such as London, but believes the tide is turning in Sydney with the success of restaurants such as Kiln, at Ace Hotel.

“I think there’s going to be a renaissance,” Benn says of hotel restaurants. The duo started by getting the small details right. They tapped their contacts, sourcing quality produce. Then they started on the cooking.

They ate their way around the city and went through a mountain of meat trying to find the perfect way to cook it on the restaurant’s woodfire grill. “We drop it in warm beef fat then roll it over the coals,” Robertson says.

Benn points to the younger chef’s smoked beef tongue with Sichuan pepper and shallot oil as a dish to watch. “Martin’s knowledge … his food is on another level,” Robertson says.

The opening menu will also include John dory with pil pil butter, tuna with tomato jelly and a dessert of roasted nectarine melba with cultured cream.

Robertson describes the Hyde Park views from the Mitchell & Eades-designed 120-seat dining room as “quite Londonesque”.

“It’s very modern, with an open kitchen … we [also] bought a fridge for storing oysters,” Robertson says.

Open lunch Fri-Sat; dinner daily

Level 1, 161 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, sydneycommon.com.au