Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Forget New York, London and Paris -- Sydney is home to some of the world's best restaurants, according to the New York Times and the L.A. Times.
Australia's biggest city is turning into a ``mecca of sorts for anybody serious enough about food to get on a plane and fly 16 hours to get here,'' S. Irene Virbila, the L.A. Times' chief restaurant reviewer, wrote in a Sept. 25 review.
Sydney is ``right up there with New York, Paris and London'' in the ranks of the world's great eating towns, R.W. Apple Jr., New York Times' food critic, wrote in a Sept. 14 review of some of Sydney's top diners.
The city of 4 million people has come a long way from its ``meat, spuds and veggies'' tradition of 20 to 30 years ago, said Matthew Evans, a former chef and now chief restaurant reviewer at the Sydney Morning Herald. Today, Sydneysiders can choose from more than 2,500 restaurants, from bustling Thai kitchens to top-end diners such as Neil Perry's Rockpool.
Beppi Polese, who still runs the restaurant he opened in 1956 after emigrating to Australia from Italy, recalls scraping mussels from the pylons of bridges and trying to persuade reluctant diners to eat the bivalve, which was considered only suitable for fishing bait.
The city's love affair with food started to take off in the 1970s, when Tony and Gay Bilson, who had worked as chefs in France, opened Berowra Waters Inn on the Hawkesbury river, north of Sydney.
The restaurant, accessible only be seaplane or boat, was the city's first gourmet diner, cooking light, nouvelle cuisine that accentuated the quality of local produce, said Michael McMahon, who managed Berowra Waters and now owns Catalina Rose Bay, a harborside diner in Sydney's ritzy eastern suburbs.
An influx of immigrants, from Europe after World War II, and Asia in the 1970s after the abolition of the White Australia policy, which had restricted immigration mostly to people of European descent, added variety to the local fare.
The result are diners such as Tetsuya's, which U.K.-based Restaurant Magazine this year named Australasia's best eatery, and the world's fourth-best behind England's Fat Duck, Spain's El Bulli and California's French Laundry.
Wakuda, who had never worked in a restaurant before arriving in Australia in 1982 at the age of 22, blends Japanese tastes with French cuisine in dishes such as grilled wagyu beef with lime jus.
``The quality of his grain-fed wagyu is phenomenal, beautiful against the dusky flavor of chestnut mushroom,'' Virbila wrote in the L.A. Times.
At Marque, a small French diner in inner-city Surry Hills, chef Mark Best, a former electrician, serves an eight-course degustation that starts with chaud-froid egg, an appetizer of warm egg yolk combined with a cold cream of sherry, vinegar and maple syrup served in the egg shell with grissini.
That's followed by dishes such as lobster broth with parmesan custard and artichoke; blue swimmer crab with almond gazpacho and jelly on sweet corn custard; a ``risotto'' of rice-grain sized calamari with harbor prawns, and pork tenderloin with pumpkin puree, lemon confit and a ``licorice'' of almond meal, dried black olives and star anise.
Best, who worked at three-star Michelin restaurant ``L'Arpege'' in Paris, was named Chef of the Year in this year's Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide.
Other restaurants singled out by Virbila and Apple included Icebergs, an Australian-Italian diner perched above the southern end of Bondi Beach; Becasse, which serves French-inspired food such as smoked haddock with caviar and pig's trotter, and Sailor's Thai in the Rocks, Sydney's historic area near the Harbor Bridge.
The accolades made front page news in Sydney. ``Tastiest city in the world,'' proclaimed the Daily Telegraph, Sydney's top-selling newspaper. ``Eat your words, Paris: We're world's best for food'' said a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald.
While the praise of influential U.S. critics is welcome, Sydney restaurateurs can't afford to rest on their laurels, said Catalina's McMahon. Rising rents and labor costs mean almost two-thirds of restaurants make profit of less than 2 percent of sales, according to industry group Restaurant & Catering Australia.
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