Botanic Gardens take pop-up to a new level

It is easy to be blase about pop-up restaurants in a city where they intermittently populate our florists, furniture stores and empty warehouses. But the eateries operating at the Sydney Botanic Gardens, coinciding with the run of the opera Carmen, take the pop-up to a new level.

It isn't just the jaw-dropping view, but that the restaurants haven't squeezed themselves into an existing building: they're housed in a purpose-built, three-storey structure on a sloping site with the finest portable loos Short Black has ever seen.

Caterer Peter McCloskey's Platinum Lounge restaurant and bar (pictured, by Anson Smart) finishes on Sunday night, but will be back for the opera run in 2014.

No doubt there are a few horticulturalists who will disagree, but it wouldn't be a bad spot for a more permanent venue.