Sydney's best food spots: The best way to explore your own city

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This was published 8 years ago

Sydney's best food spots: The best way to explore your own city

By Ben Groundwater
Find an interesting reason to discover a different part of your city.

Find an interesting reason to discover a different part of your city.Credit: Christopher Pearce/Fairfax Media

There aren't many tourists in Auburn, out in Sydney's western suburbs. Those open-topped bus tours certainly don't call past that way. I doubt Auburn features prominently in Lonely Planet either.

But still, my friends and I decided to head out there a few years ago in the name of tourism. And in the pursuit of good food.

None of us had been before. We're all transplants to the Sydney life, my group, mostly English expats and former Queenslanders, and we rarely make it out of the eastern suburbs bubble. Some of the guys are impossible to remove from Coogee, let alone get them west of George Street.

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The way to tempt everyone out to Auburn that day was with the promise of amazing Iranian food from Darband Restaurant. And because it was time to do what few of us, even the most passionate travellers, ever do: explore our own city.

It had occurred to my group of friends one day that, despite priding ourselves on being travellers and explorers, we'd seen embarrassingly little of the place we called home. We'd all been to Laos together – but most of us hadn't even made it to St Leonards.

You tend to move in small circles in a big city, to find your own little pocket of comfort and rarely move out of it. You forget that you can become a tourist in your own town. If you're a lifelong traveller who craves the thrill of somewhere new, you can find it without going to the airport.

People line up to buy Pad Thai.

People line up to buy Pad Thai.Credit: Christopher Pearce

The trick to discovering your own city, we found, is to come up with an interesting reason to see it. And some good friends to see it with.

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For us, that reason began in 2010, during the FIFA World Cup. Jealous of the large contingent of Australians who'd gone over to Germany to watch the tournament live, my friends and I decided we'd do the next best thing, and go to watch a game at Sydney's Concordia Club, which acts as something of a German community centre. We ate bratwurst, we drank Franziskaner, and we cheered for "Die Mannschaft".

We had so much fun that we decided to go to Petersham a few nights later to watch Portugal play. Pretty soon we'd come up with a new concept, the "World Cup of Eating", where we'd spend the tournament travelling around Sydney visiting the immigrant and expat communities of the teams who were playing, eat their food and watch their team play.

Eventually the tournament came to an end, which meant our World Cup of Eating had drawn to a close as well. But we'd developed a taste for local foodie adventure, and we wanted more.

So we came up with a new concept: the "Alphabet of Eating". Instead of travelling for football teams we'd travel for cuisines, working our way from "A for Argentinean" to "Z for Zimbabwean", and eat those foods in the parts of Sydney where the relevant expat community typically lived.

That began in 2011. Four years down the track, and we're up to the letter Y. (There's no Yemeni restaurant in Sydney that we can find, so it we may end up having to fudge things and go "Y for Yugoslavian" at the Balkan Restaurant. Any better ideas, swing them my way.)

We've eaten Hungarian food in Randwick, Lebanese in Lakemba, Iranian in Auburn, Vietnamese in Bankstown, fudged our way through the difficult "X" by eating Xianese food in Chinatown, and, in what was both a highlight and lowlight, ate the cuisine of the United States of America at Hooters in Parramatta. We've had great food and we've had average food. We've had quiet nights and we've had drunken ragers.

The best thing, however, is that we've seen Sydney, our adopted hometown – the good and the bad, the ugly and the pretty. We've been to The Rocks, which is as touristy as it comes, albeit in search of Belgian food. We've been to Crows Nest, which is "OTB", or over the bridge, and therefore not a place any of us has ever seen before. That was for Cajun food. Obviously.

It's been something of a revelation, this whole thing, getting to see more of Sydney while enjoying its delicious cuisine.

All we had to do was explore Sydney the same way we'd explore any city: by trying to find good food.

How would you travel in the hunt for good food? Leave a comment below.

Email: b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au

Instagram: instagram.com/bengroundwater

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