The game changers of the Australian food scene

Uncompromising is not a word you hear attached to the restaurant industry often. As it gets harder to make a buck, business owners are more inclined to soften their stance rather than harden it. But the world was never changed by those who change themselves to suit the world. It's the stubborn ones who stick to their guns who move us forward.

Behind all the hats and brickbats involved in the inaugural annual national Good Food Guide are some extraordinary stories, and some powerfully stubborn people, slowly persevering with their own visions.

Like Argentinian-born Alejandro Cancino, co-owner and chef of Brisbane's Urbane. How uncompromising do you have to be to open just three nights a week, and offer only degustation menus, either omnivore or herbivore? Few chefs in Australia could get away with it – not to mention have people line up for menus that might feature test tubes of full-bodied consomme with crisp salted duck's tongue, or Gold Coast prawns with fermented pumpkin, mandarin emulsion and kimchi juice. It helps that Cancino also looks after the adjoining more informal (read, commercial) six-day-a-week bistro,The Euro, but still. Brave.

And like Kylie Kwong of Sydney's Billy Kwong, who took the Cantonese food she grew up with, and turned it into the kind of food she could believe in, focussing on sustainable and ethical food producers, indigenous ingredients and even the odd insect or two. In the process, she has created a whole new Australian-Chinese cuisine, from crisp organic saltbush cakes to red-braised caramelised wallaby tail.

And like Joel Valvasori of Lulu La Delizia in Perth, who traded the hurly-burly of the Perth CBD and the buzz of the award-winning Lalla Rookh restaurant for a small suburban trattoria dedicated to the art of home-made pasta (and the odd cocktail). By concentrating on doing one thing well, he has moved beyond the trite cliches into more evolved and personal dishes such as squid ink bigoli in salsa with smoked fish crumb, and ricotta gnocchi with blue swimmer crab.

And like Lennox Hastie of Sydney's Firedoor, who built an entire restaurant out of his uncompromising love of smoke, fire, wood and coals in 2015. Talk about stubborn. It has been a slow burn for Hastie, as diners used to an easy fix weren't immediately drawn to the purity of his approach, but it's now paying off.

Then there's Jock Zonfrillo of Restaurant Orana, an evangelical Scottish-Italian chef who uses his Adelaide restaurant as a tool for reconciliation. He has now established the Orana Foundation, dedicated to establishing an Australian native foods database, while Orana's harmonious and graceful cuisine converts diners nightly, with its smoking potato damper with smoked macadamia butter and native thyme, and firepit flathead with eucalyptus.

But you can't talk uncompromising without talking Aaron Turner of Igni, he of the serious bushranger beard. Tucked away in a back lane of Geelong, Igni is an intriguing mix of wood-fired cooking, rawness, finesse and extemporaneity. Changing the menu from day to day, table to table and hour to hour – from crisp chicken skin with creamy cod roe, to a twirl of potato noodles in garlicky chicken fat or onion ice-cream with quinoa cracker – requires deep reserves of skill, sensitivity and self-belief.

Some game-changers, like Brent Savage of Sydney's Bentley group, evolve in a straight line. What seemed a surprising move, to switch to a meat-free menu at Yellow in Potts Point, was no shock to any dedicated follower of this intelligent and intuitive chef. Likewise, Attica's Ben Shewry continues to explore the wild, the foraged and the indigenous, while also turning his attention inwards to disrupt the industry status quo. In an effort to decompress the intense pressure of the professional kitchen, he has radicalised the kitchen shifts at his three-hat restaurant to a 48-hour week (four days on, three days off).

Josh Niland of Sydney's Saint Peter simply concentrates on fish. That's it. There's no red meat on the menu, just immaculately sourced and dry-aged fish, from fin to tail, complete with organs. And it's revolutionary, from the raw 21-day-aged Mooloolaba albacore to the Taren Point sea urchin crumpets.

Danielle Alvarez wanted her kitchen at Fred's in Sydney's Paddington to be open and welcoming, and her food to be local, seasonal and only from producers she knows personally. It's a lot easier to say than it is to do, but she's doing it.

Dan Hunter – this year's overnight success with his first cookbook and first entry into the World's 50 Best Restaurants – would laugh at the use of the term "overnight" ( and probably the word "success" as well). It has taken years for the quiet revolution that is Brae to take place on the 14.5 hectares of productive gardens, chook sheds and luxury accommodation. Even the plates used in the restaurant are made using clay taken from the property's dams. The 15 courses of super-natural food are simply part of the landscape, part of the evolution.

But if you really want to see the future of regional dining, then head for the hills, where those devilishly disrupting winemakers Anton Von Klopper and Jasper Button teamed up with sommelier Aaron Fenwick to create the Summertown Aristologist in the Adelaide Hills. It's equal parts restaurant, bodega, wine bar, canteen and espresso bar, with one blackboard menu for wine and one for food.

The last time I was there, the only meat on the menu was from their own pig; the produce came from the winemakers' own farms, and the grain was milled on site for their slow-ferment bread. When I ordered figs, the chef wandered outside and down the street to the fig tree, returning with half a dozen figs in his apron.

In the open kitchen, former Cumulus Inc. chef Oliver Edwards makes vegetables the hero with salt-roasted and smoked celeriac teamed with silky potato pasta, crispy saltbush and soft egg yolk and a burnt butter dressing; easy, natural food that makes ordering another glass of wine seem like the only logical thing to do.

It's not so much about minimal-intervention winemakers offering minimal-intervention food, says Aaron Fenwick, as about the same search for purity and nourishment in both food and wine. "What really matters to us is the enjoyment of simple pleasures done right." Weirdly, that's one hell of a revolutionary statement.

The national Good Food Guide 2018, in partnership with Citi and Vittoria, is available from newsagencies, bookstores and via thestore.com.au/goodfood, RRP $29.99