During its nearly 60-year run, Sydney’s Wentworth Hotel has been the backdrop to political events, near scandal and a roll call of guests including Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando and Margaret Thatcher.

The mid-century gem on Phillip Street, which has seemingly served as many celebrities as hot dinners, is about to make a major change in food direction. Its restaurants and bars have been outsourced to House Made Hospitality, the outfit behind CBD restaurants Lana and Grana.

On the first weekend of October, House Made opens Tilda restaurant with former Ledbury (London) chef Nathanael Merchant at the helm, as well as its sibling, Bar Tilda. They will be the first of four venues at the hotel, which is considered Sydney hotel royalty.

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“The [late Queen Elizabeth II], stayed here, as did Putin, the Stones and the Beatles,” House Made director Justin Newton says.

When Qantas opened the Wentworth in 1966, it was Sydney’s first international hotel built specifically to cater for the “jet set”. While guests in the 1960s ate at restaurants with antiquated monikers such as the Ayers Rock Grill, new guests will dine at Tilda (short for Matilda), which will plot a more contemporary Australian path while trying to retain elements of mid-century Sydney.

“We want some of that glamour of hotel dining and drinking [from the time],” Newton says. Cigar smoke from the era may have cleared, but Tilda will offer a retro tableside bread and butter tray service with an array of garnishes, while Bar Tilda includes a martini trolley.

Bar Tilda has a street entrance, while the restaurant, which is deeper in the lobby level, will pair native lemon myrtle with scallops, cook Murray cod over charcoal, and offer a luxe surf and turf mixed grill of rib-eye and lobster.

Tilda and Bar Tilda will be joined later this month by Wentworth Bar, up on the hotel’s famed level-five horseshoe terrace, and a Vietnamese-French restaurant, Delta Rue. “We’ll have a banh mi trolley at Delta Rue,” Newton says.

The Wentworth, which Qantas sold in 1982, has hosted countless election night political party parties, was very nearly at the centre of an international scandal when suspect mushrooms were taste-tested by the hotel’s chefs before they were served up to King Charles III and his then wife, Princess Diana, in 1983.

The hotel has gone through several changes over the years, but has been the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth since 2002. Newton says the use of an external restaurant operator marks a growing shift at hotels, but maintains “you have to respect we are in a hotel”.

“There are 436 rooms, so there are up to 700 people who have to be fed,” he says.