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Canberra winners announced in the AFR Top 100 Restaurants 2016

Natasha Rudra

Mike Harrington, Pete Harrington and Dino Jugovac and chef Johnon MacDonald.
Mike Harrington, Pete Harrington and Dino Jugovac and chef Johnon MacDonald.Graham Tidy

Chalk up a monster win for Canberra. The stylish bar and restaurant at Hotel Hotel in NewActon has been named one of Australia's top 100 restaurants.

The Australian Financial Review's Top 100 Restaurants were announced in a buzzy ceremony in Sydney on Monday, May 2. The award's directors are Fairfax food writers Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack.

Sean McConnell of Monster
Sean McConnell of MonsterPeter Braig
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The list is chosen by 500 top chefs and restaurateurs from around Australia and Dupleix says Monster's spot in the list reflects how Australian chefs think about food.

"This is the sort of place that chefs and restaurateurs love, they get it, they love the serious nature of the food and the informal nature of the dining," she says.

Monster was the sole Canberra representative in the Top 100 Restaurants list, coming in at number 80 while Biota, the two-hatted Bowral restaurant run by foraging chef James Viles, scored in the top 30.

Monster at Hotel Hotel
Monster at Hotel HotelSupplied

And while chefs love Monster, diners love Akiba, which took out the People's Choice Award with a massive popular vote. The people have already shown a lot of love for the trendy Asian bar owned by brother Peter and Michael Harrington and their business partner Dino Jugovac. In 2015, Akiba came second in the People's Choice, just behind Sydney classic dining spot Catalina.

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"It's a very buzzy streetwise Asian diner, it's a very professional team behind it - and the people have voted. It's dumplings, it's noodles, it's sizzle. I love that so much of the cooking is done over charcoal," Dupleix says.

Ben Willis' two-hatted Aubergine was the sole Canberra entrant in the inaugural Top 100 Restaurants list last year.

Dupleix says the list of restaurants has changed quite a bit from 2015, with a wide mix of restaurants that reflect the broad tastes of the nation's chefs.

"The overall results of the top 100 are great, the chefs really sat down and thought, 'Well who is it that I respect, and who's really cutting it,'" she says. "And the top 10 are such a beautiful mix of really high end and hipster and a rare entry from Tasmania. It's just taking it up from last year."

She singled out Biota's James Viles as a chef who's shaping Australia's culinary scene with food that's extremely local, foraged, hunted and caught (often by Viles himself) in the lush forests around Bowral in the Southern Highlands.

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"He's one of the hardest workers in the industry and he's really sort of building his own place within the structure of the top restaurants in Australia, simply by being very true to where he is," she says.

"It's an incredibly professional restaurant and it's is intensely personal too. His pursuit of provenance is really changing the nature of what it is to be a regional restaurant."

Akiba owners Peter and Michael Harrington described themselves as elated to win the popular vote.

"We are humbled with the way Canberra has supported Akiba, and we are also surprised with the amount of customers who travel from Sydney and Melbourne saying that they came to Canberra just to eat at Akiba," Michael Harrington said.

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Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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