Woodland gets heads up on Pony

Neutral Bay's Pony restaurant will be renamed Woodland Kitchen & Bar next month after chef Damian Heads confirmed he is buying his partners' stake in the restaurant.

Heads, a former winner of the Josephine Pignolet Best Young Chef award, says the lower north shore restaurant will be his from mid-October.

Earlier this year, Heads withdrew from his involvement in the Pony restaurants at The Rocks and in Brisbane. ''I really want to make it a good local brasserie,'' Heads says. And what's behind the Woodland name? ''You sit on timber, you look at timber and there's five kilometres of laid timber above your head in the restaurant. And The Oaks is around the corner,'' he says.