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Celebrate our best restaurants, but take list with a pinch of salt

Terry Durack
Terry Durack

Hearty congratulations: Chef Ben Shewry.
Hearty congratulations: Chef Ben Shewry.Eddie Jim

There is precious little difference between a best restaurant list and a political poll - you can spin them any way you want, depending on your agenda.

So the fact Sydney restaurant Quay has moved down the list and Tetsuya's and Marque are off it entirely - coupled with the fact that Melbourne's Attica is Australia's highest entry in the top 50, ranked at number 21 - has led to much choking on the Farmer Jo muesli among Sydney foodies.

Could it be that Melbourne is the true dining capital of this country and that Sydney is no longer the global destination they believe it to be? Well, yes and no.

Let's just calm down, have another coffee and take a closer look at this year's list. Of the three Australian restaurants to make the top 100, two of them - Quay (48) and Momofuku Seiobo (89), are in Sydney. If we care to stop gazing at our navels and embrace the wider world, then it would be clear that there are three more Sydney chefs all enjoying success with their restaurants overseas: Brett Graham's The Ledbury in London is now at 13, David Thompson's Nahm in Bangkok is 32, and Tetsuya Wakuda's Waku Ghin in Singapore is 68.

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By a Sydneysider's reckoning, that makes the score Sydney 5, Melbourne 1. But let's not be petty and parochial. One could simply argue Sydney and Melbourne have one entry each in the much-publicised top 50.

When you consider how remote Australia is from most of the chefs, foodies and critics who vote in these awards (to vote for a restaurant, judges must have visited it within the past 18 months), it is a huge credit to all those restaurants, past and present, that have appeared on the list, from Sydney's Rockpool to Melbourne's Flower Drum.

Everyone loves a list, and restaurant tragics love poring over the World's 50 Best to tally how many notches they have on their belt. To treat it as a definitive barometer of the state of dining in any country or region is not the point; better to have fun with its changing trends, and add an idea or two to your bucket list.

As for Sydney and Melbourne, they are two of the great food cities of the world, with brilliantly diverse and multi-ethnic layerings of great dining at every level. Instead of wasting time working out which city has the edge, I'd prefer to pass on hearty congratulations to Attica for jumping 42 places, and winning the award for the highest new entry. It's a thoughtful, personal, refreshingly Australian restaurant with a uniquely gifted chef, and we should all be very proud of it.

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Terry DurackTerry Durack is the chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and Good Food.

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