Good Food Guide 2023: Meet the NSW Chef of the Year award finalists

From the street stalls of Malaysia to the most lauded of London restaurants, The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide 2023 Oceania Cruises Chef of the Year finalists draw on a diverse range of cultural experiences to shape and elevate Sydney cuisine.

Chefs Junda Khoo (Ho Jiak), Alex Wong (Lana), Annita Potter (Viand), Toshihiko Oe (Sushi Oe), Alan Stuart and Clare Smyth (Oncore by Clare Smyth) have each been recognised for their contribution to the city's evolving hospitality industry.

At Ho Jiak, self-taught chef and co-owner Khoo farewelled a promising career in finance to bring new prominence to home-style Malaysian cooking.

"I wanted to pay homage to my grandmother," Khoo says.

The menu features Khoo's interpretation of his favourite childhood dish, stingray with a sweet and sour assam sauce. At Ho Jiak, it's levelled up with "beautiful, nutty" barramundi.

"People said I was crazy," Khoo says. "Who will pay to come to a restaurant and have a home-cooked meal?

"But when we opened, we realised there was a demand. Australia is so multicultural, and there are so many immigrants that miss home."

Wong, too, has "found his feet" playing with culinary pluralism at Hinchcliff House venture Lana. The head chef ties together his love of Italian cuisine with his Chinese heritage, using XO sauce to heighten the umami of a lobster spaghetti and salted egg yolks to punch up the flavour of fried potatoes.

"It all feels very natural," Wong says, recalling his childhood spent eating fried rice at home and pasta at his best friend's place.

"I'm not messing around too much with Italian food. I'm just seeing what works.

"I didn't think it would hit so hard."

Khoo says his attempts to elevate Malaysian food by experimenting with tradition and using premium produce have proven "risky".

"My riskiest move was trying to get the point across that not all Malaysian food should cost $10," he says.

"Why is $35 for my char koay teow too much, but people are happy to pay that much for a bowl of pasta?"

When bookings open up once a month at cult Cammeray restaurant Sushi Oe, hundreds of would-be diners clamour to pay $230 per person for Oe's omakase experience. But it wasn't always like that, Oe says.

"When I first came to Sydney [from Tokyo], sushi had not been a popular genre," he says.

"However, in recent years, people have come to appreciate the different types and flavours of fish."

Oe, who studied under "strict" sushi chefs in Japan and Spain, says he would like to use his growing popularity to bring a higher level of sushi to Northern Sydney.

"I would like to be able to buy better quality fish for my customers," he says.

"This will, surely, allow people who are new to sushi to understand what real sushi is like."

With the opening of Viand in March, head chef and co-owner Potter introduced Sydney to its first fine-dining Thai restaurant.

"It is Thai food that people haven't really seen in Sydney before," Potter says.

Perth-born Potter discovered her love of Thai cuisine during a six-month stint in Bangkok, where she "started to understand there was this other, incredible, multi-dimensional cuisine that existed".

"I wanted to get my head around it," she says, explaining how it drove her to the door of acclaimed chef David Thompson's London restaurant Nahm, the first Thai restaurant to gain a Michelin star.

New Zealand-born Stuart, too, brings a wealth of world-class restaurant experience to Sydney, having worked in Frantzén (Stockholm), Eleven Madison Park (New York City) and Restaurant Gordon Ramsay (London).

Leading the 60-strong team at Oncore by Clare Smyth has been one of Stuart's greatest challenges in his career to date. Smyth runs the renowned Core restaurant in London, while Stuart runs the Barangaroo-based Oncore.

"There was nobody else coming from London to back me up," Stuart says of the early days after opening last year.

"Ultimately, everyone has their own opinions as to what they like when it comes to food. It's what you grew up on, your culture, your heritage and your travels that define what you like as a person.

"All we can do is try to put ourselves, our personalities and what we like, onto a plate and hope everyone likes it."