Food News

The people behind Australia’s favourite restaurants gathered at Flower Drum in Melbourne to toast the winners in Gourmet Traveller’s 2011 Restaurant Awards.

Multicoloured tomatoes, stripy eggplant, vibrant broad beans and heavenly celery have sprung to life in Stephanie Alexander’s garden.

In April the number-one spot in the World's 50 Best Restaurants poll was taken from El Bulli by Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen. In October, Noma, a cookbook by chef René Redzepi, hits the shelves and Redzepi will visit Australia to promote it in conjunction with the Sydney International Food Festival and Phaidon. On the eve of his return to Australia trip, Redzepi spoke to Gourmet Traveller chief restaurant critic Pat Nourse.

This list has been compiled using our star ratings, moderated by our state and national editors. Every restaurant listed in the Guide should offer a winning dining experience; any that achieve a placement in the Top 100 represent another order of excellence again.

There’s a riot of colour in Stephanie Alexander’s garden, from exotic South American tubers to purple-podded peas.

Call it the snow-egg effect. Peter Gilmore’s Sydney restaurant has been booked out for months. Now the chef with a passion for produce presents a sumptuous cookbook – and that recipe.

Winter salad greens, sugarsnap peas, young beetroot and narcissus flourish this month in Stephanie Alexander’s garden.

Spain's ethical foie gras, now available in Australia, is controversial in a new way, writes Richard Cornish.

From the food and the venue to the outstanding winners, the focus was on the country’s finest at this year’s Gourmet Traveller Travel Awards.

After seven years Down Under, chef Bruno Loubet has returned to London to head a new restaurant – but he’s taken his laid-back Brisbane attitude with him, writes Guy Dimond.

Pierre Hermé, Paris’s master of the macaron, talks pastry with local sweet star Adriano Zumbo.

Tender shoots of garlic, heads of young broccoli and feathery clusters of flat-leaf parsley are emerging in Stephanie Alexander’s winter garden.

Infatuated with Australia, Momofuku’s David Chang recalls his trip and shares recipes, including his famous pork buns.

Out of the pool, food is my love, writes Olympic champ and Celebrity MasterChef winner Eamon Sullivan.

The mornings have turned crisp, and Stephanie Alexander’s garden is looking a little bare, but Tuscan kale, artichokes and broad beans battle on.

Stephanie Alexander joins Gourmet Traveller with a new monthly column on growing your own kitchen garden. This month, we’re planting leeks, peas and spinach.

Whether it’s a rustic dish that reminds them of their mammas’ cooking, or a fresh take on a classic, Australia’s best Italian chefs nominate their favourite Italian dishes.

The humble grissino, pride of Turin, has saved a prince from death, captivated Napoleon and inspired the Futurists, writes John Irving. And you thought it was just a breadstick.

Evolution, not revolution, is the way for modern Italian food, says its champion, chef Massimo Bottura.

It’s a Melbourne phenomenon: the rise and rise of modern Middle Eastern cuisine. Michael Harden rides the second wave of the city’s sumac-spiced love affair.

Josh Emett returns to Melbourne this year to head the kitchens of Gordon Ramsay's Maze and Maze Grill.

New York’s Momofuku is a modern-day restaurant phenomenon, but what’s it all about? With chef David Chang visiting Australia in March, Pat Nourse offers this primer.

It’s time to take our annual foodism test. Your obsession could win you one of four fabulous KitchenAid stand mixers, designed for those who really love to cook.

Gourmet Traveller's state editors give you the lowdown on their favourite dishes of 2009.

Doomsayers be damned - 2009 has been a hell of a good year for eats, with plenty of great new stuff bursting onto the scene at both the spangled fine-diners and the food-court level.

Christmas catch
We’ve gone hunting and gathering across the country to bring you the best for your Christmas table.

In another busy year for food publishing, there were some shining stars you’ll want under your tree – to give or receive. Here are the brightest, hand-picked by the GT editorial team.

Pat Nourse caught up with the star pastry chef at his Sydney café to talk chocolate (he eats about eight handfuls a day), the future of desserts (smoke and bubblegum?) and his stance on the Violet Crumble/Crunchie divide.

On the eve of publication of Thai Street Food, his exploration of the cuisine of the noodle stalls, soup vendors and papaya-pounders of Bangkok and surrounds, London-based Australian Thai authority David Thompson sits down at Sailors Thai on a sunny Sydney morning to talk to Pat Nourse about kanom jin fermented rice noodles, the complexity and dynamic nature of Asian hawker foodways, opening a Thai restaurant in Thailand and why you shouldn't put your photographer in the back seat.

Julia Child introduced French cuisine to ’60s America, and now – thanks to Hollywood’s Nora Ephron – her home-cooking ethos is as influential as ever, writes Cerentha Harris.

Pat Nourse and Kerryn Burgess track down some of the best in the business and, amid the rattle of pans, find out what it really takes to rise to the top.

Oh, lordy. If you were asked to dream up the best wine list in the world, no expense spared, all indulgences indulged, all bases covered, all classic estates and legendary vintages included, you probably still couldn’t come close to matching the very real wine list at Sydney’s Rockpool Bar & Grill. This list is winning […]

It’s a big ask in terms of time, distance and money to eat at Dunkeld’s Royal Mail Hotel, but this is a restaurant that answers all the questions with a resounding yes. It’s a place that truly embraces the philosophies of regionality and seasonality, presenting them in a way that’s unmistakeably modern and complex but […]

Tom Sykes’ first Sydney restaurant job, back in 1996, was at a little place called Rockpool. Fast-forward almost 15 years and Sykes has not only climbed the ranks from waiter to headwaiter to assistant manager to general manager in time for the Sydney Olympics in 2000 in the crucible of the city’s most talked-about restaurant, […]

Gerald Diffey has worked at and with some of Victoria’s great names – Karen Martini, Rita Macali, Tansy Good and Stefano de Pieri among them – and has spread his affable charm wherever he’s appeared. But it’s at his small bar in Rathdowne Street, Carlton, propped next door to the pizza cacophony that is La […]

Jackson’s has always been the kind of restaurant where minor miracles of the edible kind occurred, but the wine list sometimes felt like a bit of an also-ran in the presence of chef/owner Neal Jackson’s perennially quirky fare. Enter Kjell Ove Almeland, a flamboyant Norwegian with a patois so chunky you could carve it. (His […]

There’ll never be a need to carbon date the quantum leap in Australia’s food fashion. Or to ponder its greatest influence. In 1975, Leo Schofield penned the first guide to eating out in Sydney and went on to become the senior restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. Today, as editor-at-large for Australian Gourmet Traveller, […]

In retrospect, the 12 months since the last GT awards might not seem like the most felicitous period in which to open an ambitious new restaurant. And yet here we are with an embarrassment of restaurant riches. It’s hard to remember a year in which the new restaurant gong was anywhere near this hotly contested. […]

When Cam Birt and Stephanie Canfell, partners in Brisbane’s standard-setting Bowery bar, decided to open a dégustation-only restaurant in an old bank building one storey above street level in the still-edgy Fortitude Valley, Ryan Squires topped their chef shopping list. Queensland-bred Squires had made a splash a few years earlier, returning from stints at The […]

Yes, lightning really can strike in the same place twice. If anything, the Quay that is Restaurant of the Year today is, dare we say it, a better place than it was 12 months ago when it first won the award. All the things that made it great then – the unmatched commitment to sourcing […]

Here are the restaurants our reviewers rated best in each state and region at a glance, from those awarded stars to those next most highly ranked.

This list has been compiled using our star ratings, moderated by our state and national editors. Every restaurant listed in the Guide should offer a winning dining experience; any that achieve a placement in the Top 100 represent another order of excellence again.

We award stars to restaurants which we have found to be genuinely and consistently exceptional in their food, wine and hospitality.

We’ve downed forks, the votes are in, and we are proud to present the Australian Gourmet Traveller 2010 Restaurant Awards.

The envelope, please
It’s been an exhaustive process but we’re proud to reveal our short-listed nominees for the 2010 Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Awards.

Backstage at his Sanctuary Cove show, the Kitchen Nightmare speaks to Pat Nourse about the Grimshaw affair and his new Australian project.

Grab a drink, sit down and relax: the talented team behind Sydney restaurant Buzo are doing all the hard work, serving up rustic wintry fare that’s perfect for a weekend away.

Gordon Ramsay worked for some of Europe’s greatest chefs on his way to the top of the cooking game. Not coincidentally, perhaps, he also worked for some individuals who were as well known back-of-house for their tempers as they were known out front for their culinary grace. It’s no secret that Ramsay gives it today as good as he got it as a young chef, and he’s unflinching in his assessment of the top terrors he’s encountered in his time in the kitchen.

With duck confit and steak frites thick on the ground these days, a good bistro meal isn’t hard to find. But what about a great one? We track down the country’s best, dish by dish.

The Pat Nourse Polaroid files: "These pictures were taken at the winners' lunch at St John restaurant the day after the World's 50 Best Restaurants ceremony. I've had the pleasure of chairing the Australian and Pacific votes. It's not a paid gig, but an invite to join the critics who head the other voting panels and the award-winning chefs at a lunch hosted by Fergus Henderson is incentive enough. This year's menu kicked off with an ox heart salad (the hearts of oxen, not a type of tomato), followed by pig's head and potato pie (with plenty of mustard) and ice-cream flavoured with the Dr Henderson, Fergus's favourite cocktail of Fernet Branca and crème de menthe."

From the Ultimate Dinner to the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival (and spinning discs with Shane Osborn), The Fat Duck’s Heston Blumenthal shares his Australian diary.

Just as the French sommelier's reputation is built on the depth of his list, the Vietnamese chef stakes his pride on the quality of his fish sauce, writes Paul Daley.

Eugenio Maiale’s hand-wrought Italian cuisine has called many to the table at Sydney’s A Tavola. Here, he serves up dishes inspired by his childhood and his family’s rich Abruzzese heritage. Dig in.

We quizzed the best kitchen talents on their secrets to the perfect spaghetti Bolognese. The responses varied but were never ambivalent: this dish is unanimously loved, however it’s made.

From the tastiest new cut of steak to the most anticipated “debut”, here’s what’s exciting us about the Australian food scene in 2009.

Quick recipes to make the most of your secondary cut.

Gourmet Traveller salutes Australia’s chefs and restaurants who are showing their support of the Victorian bushfire victims by hosting fundraising events.

Gourmet Traveller food editor Rodney Dunn swapped the horns of city traffic for the honk of geese to set up his farm-based cooking school, The Agrarian Kitchen. Take a tour.

You don’t have to pretend any more. If you’re obsessed with food, here’s your chance to declare it.

I have just opened a restaurant. The food is under control, but we are having a hard time with waiters. How can I find a good batch of waiters? By nabila viriot – owner new resto Madeline Nieuwenhuizen, a manager at Sydney restaurant Aria, writes: The unfortunate reality is that there are just not enough good, […]

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, and whether you're looking for a bottle of bubbly that won't break the bank, a last minute trip idea, luxe brekkie-in-bed, small bites, meals to share, or sexy desserts, you'll find it here.

What does Australia’s finest cooking talent whip up come time to clock off? Here are 72 great quick dishes and not a soufflé or tian in sight.

Australia’s top chefs dish the dirt on what they’re resolving to do better in 2009.

Australia’s top chefs dish the dirt on what they’re resolving to do better in 2009.

Restaurant critic Pat Nourse delves deep into his duck fat-stained personal files to bring you the best of 2008’s eating in 10 easy dishes.

It's that time of year again when we turn to our tried and true Christmas favourites. From roast turkey and glazed ham to rum-soaked pud, we have the standards covered (and variations to boot). There's a reason why these dishes have endured the test of time.

For French-born Brisbane chef Bruno Loubet, Christmas is about tradition – pulling out all stops for the ultimate in grandeur and elegance.

Our handy nationwide guide, recommending what to buy and where, will help minimise your time in the kitchen during the busy run-up to Christmas.

“One of the things I love most about Asian food is that it’s often designed for the shared table.” So says Neil Perry in our exclusive extract from his new book, Balance & Harmony: Asian Food. Create your own Asian banquet with these fab recipes.

Who better to extol the virtues of this rich Spanish cuisine than Barcelona-born chef Javier Codina. He lets trad dishes such as fisherman’s rice do the talking.

Javier Degen, proprietor of The Spanish Pantry and importer of fine hams, gives us the lowdown on jamón.

Our group attended a popular Errol St eatery last Saturday night only to be refused our BYO wine. What was puzzling about this was that their status as a ‘BYO wine’ restaurant is well publicised even to the point where they confirmed the corkage cost ($6.50pb) to us in advance. Is this the emerging trend […]

The atmospheric and permanently bustling Perth restaurant, Balthazar, is one of the best places in Australia to drink wine. The walls are lined with the great and the good bottles; regular diners lap up the constantly changing and extensive by-the-glass selection; serious wine tragics spend hours perusing the extensive, rich and deep list. But there’s […]

Great restaurants are an amalgam of many physical and human elements; bringing them together can be hard, even when the location is central. For it to happen in rural Victoria, as has happened at Dunkeld’s Royal Mail Hotel, is the kind of serendipitous outcome nobody could seriously have planned. Sometimes, the stars just line up. […]

Christine Manfield has something of a fondness for the road less travelled. Whether it’s the flavours in her food, the way it looks on the plate or, indeed, the way it’s structured on the menu, she’s willing – driven, almost – to step away from the familiar in search of new ways to do things. […]

All Cam Birt and Stephanie Canfell wanted was somewhere to drink. But from such small beginnings, great things can grow. “We wanted a cocktail bar that we wanted to go to. That’s all,” says Birt. The year was 2003. Birt had been working in bars in Japan and Canfell had just moved back to Brisbane […]

In a wine-savvy town, Adelaide sommelier James Erskine stands tall for his dedicated yet humble approach to guiding restaurant diners’ wine choices. The 29-year-old sommelier at Auge restaurant has combined a winning mix of easy charm with infectious enthusiasm to recommend superb wines that suit Auge’s modern take on Italian food, based on knowledge gleaned […]

You don’t need to be old to appreciate so many things we take for granted were simply not possible 25 years ago. Take Victoria’s liberal – and enlightened – licensing laws, in relation to consuming beverages with or without food, for example. It wasn’t that long ago that pubs provided the only glimmer of opportunity […]

A team of champions, they say, doesn’t always make for a champion team. Even so, when Sydney’s Guillaume Brahimi accepted the offer to set up on the banks of the Yarra at Crown, he knew it was going to take a special brigade to have the kind of impact Bistro Guillaume has made on Melbourne. […]

“This is nothing like we expected,” says Elvis Abrahanowicz. “We just wanted a nice place that everyone liked, which is, I guess, what we’ve got, but it’s all out of proportion to what we thought would happen.” He’s talking about the rampant success of Bodega, the mostly Spanish tapas restaurant he and co-head chef Ben […]

Chinese artichokes, tiny purple onions, native violets. White carrots, white borage and the rare and elusive white broad bean. Blossoms of carrot, rosemary and pea. Celtuce. The tuber known only as sweet root. Peter Gilmore’s shopping list sounds, at times, like a cross between a naturopath’s mini-bar and Act 4, Scene 1 from Macbeth. At […]

Do I leave a tip if the food’s good, but the waiter’s lousy? “Tricky. Short of slipping a note over the pass into the kitchen on your way out or hiding it under a mound of uneaten cavolo nero, or having a face-off with your waiter, asking them to take the tip directly to the […]

He’s taken Manhattan by storm, and now Alistair Wise, Gordon Ramsay’s pastry chef prodigy, returns home to tempt us with an armoury of irresistibly decadent desserts.

Meet the winners of the Australian Gourmet Traveller 2009 Restaurant Guide awards.

Mark Best, chef-patron of Sydney three-star Marque, talks to Gourmet Traveller features editor Pat Nourse about carrot juice, sleeping with Rodin and needle-nose pliers.

Game hunter. Shark fisherman. Bad boy. Chef. Marco Pierre White is an enigma wrapped in a grimace smoking a Marlboro. On the one hand, he’s the boy from the council estate in Leeds deemed frightening by some members of the press, the loose cannon who was turfing people out of restaurants and reducing his chefs […]

Drumroll, please …

Pork belly recipes Porchetta Chunky chorizo, chicken and vegetable soup Pork belly, chorizo and breadcrumbs with oranges (Migas) Crisp pork belly with fennel and white anchovy salad Salt-cured pork belly with broad bean ragoût Conchiglie with braised pork belly and radicchio   Crisp roasted pork belly,Fish and Wine**, Coolangatta, Qld ** Chef Dean Sammut wowed […]

Beijing cuisine has an enormous gastronomic range but for intensity of flavour it’s all about the hawker foods, from fragrant crisp duck to simple noodle soup. Perfect for a night in watching the Games.

What’s the deal with restaurants that don’t take reservations? Are they trying to make life hard for us? By Matt Pat Nourse, Gourmet Traveller restaurant critic and features editor writes: It seems like a fiendish invention, this no-bookings business, but there’s method in the badness. For one thing, it means that you can rock up at […]

Australia’s Three-Star Chefs: In Their Own Words

“Get in there, have a go and enjoy it,” says Warren Turnbull, chef/owner of Sydney’s Restaurant Assiette, of the modern French dishes he’s created for us. They’re bistro classics with his unique stamp – a raw take on steak frites, a poached egg made crisp and spiced financières. Ah, oui, c’est trés bon.

Foul-mouthed, aggressive, authoritarian? John Lethlean comes face to face with the real Gordon Ramsay; British chef, TV personality and (possibly) Australian restaurateur.

How are restaurants addressing our desire to eat more healthy foods and are there any restaurants doing this well? By meagan Pat Nourse, Gourmet Traveller features editor and restaurant critic, answers: Broadly speaking, I’d say that healthy eating and restaurant food don’t have an enormous amount to do with one another. Sydney chef Janni Kyritsis, […]

Gourmet Traveller features editor Pat Nourse ran into Jay Rayner in London and thought he’d ask the piratical-locked Observer restaurant critic a few questions about his new book, The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner, and the business of being a restaurant critic.

Melbourne Italian impresarios Maurice Terzini and Robert Marchetti return home to acclaim with a modern ‘Roman’ trattoria that’s all about fun. Take a look.

**Steak frites, Montrachet, Brisbane **Montrachet’s steak, frites and salad has achieved legendary status with Francophile Brisbanites, and the appeal of this simple dish – the chips hand-cut and bronzed, the beef tender and pan-fried exactly to your personal taste – shows no sign of abating. About 150 orders are dispatched from Thierry Galichet’s Paddington kitchen […]

****Silks’ braised abalone with webbing from duck’s feet: $1380 per kilogram ****To spend as much money on food as fast as you can, head to Crown’s high-end Cantonese restaurant Silks and order a portion of the braised abalone with webbing from duck’s feet. At $138 per 100 grams (or $1380 per kilogram), this is a […]

****Alistair Wise, Hobart **“You’re an idiot,” was Gordon Ramsay’s typically subtle response when word got out that Alistair Wise, the founding pastry chef at Ramsay’s eponymous New York restaurant, was returning to Tasmania to start his own venture. The first year of Ramsay’s foray into Manhattan was something of a rollercoaster, with a less-than-glowing review […]

**Mad Cow, Sydney **You can read the full review for all the details but, for those with appetites bigger than their attention spans, here’s the word: high-stakes steaks in a room with a look that owes more to The Love Boat than Peter Luger. The disposition and clothing of the staff, and the volume and […]