Alex Carlton is a Sydney-based food and travel writer with nearly two decades of journalism experience. She writes for top Australian and international lifestyle publications, including Qantas, Gourmet Traveller, Escape, and The Australian. As the Oceania Academy Chair for the World's 50 Best Restaurants, she brings deep insight into the global dining scene.
Please introduce yourself to our members.
My name's Alex Carlton and I'm a food and travel writer based in Sydney, Australia. I'm also the Oceania Academy Chair for World's 50 Best Restaurants. I write features and review restaurants for many Australian and international lifestyle publications including Qantas, Gourmet Traveller, Escape, The Australian, Good Food and a bunch of others.
Tell us about your current project.
I'm always on deadline with something, but if I gave away details of my work before it's published I'd have to kill you (or perhaps my editors would kill me).
Tell us about the restaurant scene in Sydney.
Australia was one of the global pioneers of ingredient-led, boundary-free cooking. You will eat well at all price points in Sydney, from creative, fine-dining artistry to family-run holes in the wall. Our geographical proximity to Asia and large population of Asian Australians means that flavours from that continent sit very naturally in Australian gastronomy. Native ingredients such as macadamias, quandong, wattleseed and kangaroo, are also commonly found on menus throughout the city. All of it is served with the easygoing, starch-free professionalism and warmth that Australians are known for.
What are your three favorite restaurants in Sydney and why?
- Saint Peter. Josh Niland does things with fish that defy gravity. He understands the provenance and anatomy of seafood with the precision of a biologist and he marries that science with an artist's sense of flavour and presentation. There is nowhere like it in the world.
- Aalia. A thoughtful exploration of Middle Eastern cuisine, cooked by Paul Farag, a chef whose palate never misses. His delicately-spiced cuttlefish with ummak hurriyya and couscous is one of the city's great dishes.
- Baba's Place. A third culture amalgam that I think of as the most Australian restaurant in Australia. Inside a memory-stuffed warehouse in the inner west, the team here draws from their parents' and grandparents' heritage (which ricochets all over the globe from Lebanon to Italy to Macedonia), blends it with references from their own childhoods in Australia and adult eating experiences to create an entirely new food style they call "suburban cuisine". The end result is respectful and reverential but above all it's really good eating.
What's a new restaurant in Sydney that you think is doing great things?
King Clarence in Sydney. If you're going to eat pan-Asian food, Australia is the place to do it. Brent Savage and Khanh Nguyen's cooking references China, Japan and Korea but it's not kitsch or pastiche. Push past the Instagram hits, like their fish finger bao bun, and dig into the creativity of dishes like their squares of amethyst tuna with paperbark oil and a beef tartare that gets an audacious remix from crushed peanuts, chilli crisps, tarragon and pickled celery. Nick Hildebrandt's obsessively-collected wine stash (which can be accessed from all of their venues around the city) is quite possibly the best in the country.
Do you have any hidden gem that you want to highlight in Sydney?
I'm not going to point you to a hidden gem of a restaurant, but a hidden gem of a suburb (at least it tends to be hidden for international visitors who mostly stick to areas around the harbour). It's where I live: a place called Marrickville, in the city's inner west. Marrickville is famous for its layers of cuisines that followed the suburb's original residents, particularly Greek, Lebanese and most prominently - at least today - Vietnamese. It's also Sydney's independent beer capital, with more craft breweries than anywhere else in the city. And it's scattered with excellent cafes where you can get elbow deep into our famous coffee and brunch culture.
So if you're visiting, come out here for a full day. Do the breakfast plate at Superfreak. Follow it up with a second coffee at Algorithm. Grab a banh mi at Marrickville Pork Rolls for a mid-morning snack, then head over to Viet Rolls Banh Cuon Gia Long for Bánh Canh Cua crab soup, before wild yeast beers at Wildflower. A pre-dinner pitogyro from Olympic Meats is always a good idea (get there at 5PM to beat the queues), before dinner at Baba's Placeor 20 Chapel At night, hang out at The Marrickville Hotel til they kick you out. See you there.
What’s your favorite kind of restaurant and why?
One that surprises me. Make me sit up and take notice. Make me feel something. Make the blood rush to my head. Serve me something I haven't tried before, give me a flavour or texture twist that makes my eyes widen or bang out a classic with bullseye precision. Failing that, if you can't surprise me, then throw a ton of spice at me. Incapacitate me with capsaicin. That generally does the trick.
What are your three favorite food cities and your favorite restaurants in those cities?
- Seoul
Onjium is not the newest or coolest restaurant in the Korean capital but to me is the most beautiful, expressive articulation of traditional Korean cooking, led by Chef Cho Eun-hee. I was truly emotional when I ate there. Once my heart stopped fluttering, I went straight out and stuffed myself with fried chicken, bibimbap from the market and way too many shots at some loose cocktail bar. Seoul is a city of wild contradictions and I love every bit of it.
- Hobart
The Tasmanian capital is Australia's secret food city. Every chef and producer on the island knows each other, so when Trevor's potatoes are at their waxiest or Gemma's sea urchins are at their fattiest, you'll find them on every menu, pulled from the soils or the seas mere moments before. Restaurants and bars to book: The Agrarian Kitchen, Lucinda Wine Bar, Omotenashi.
- New Zealand
Okay sure, New Zealand is not a city. But the entire country has a population that's smaller than Bangkok, so I think it can pass as a city for our purposes. A big, green, snow-capped city full of sheep.
The fine-dining food culture here is on fire. At the bottom of the South Island you'll find Amisfield's inimitable Vaughan Mabee, taming the country's wildest creatures into a mind-bending tasting menu rippling with assertive flavours. If you don't know what the wild creatures of New Zealand are - and I can say with certainly that most of the world has not tasted paua, kawakawa or titi - this is the place to find out.
At the other end of the islands, in Auckland, Tala is bringing fire-cooked Samoan flavours to the world in a charmingly creative - and unerringly delicious - tasting menu.
"The Tasmanian capital, Hobart, is Australia's secret food city where every chef and producer knows each other. Restaurants and bars to book: The Agrarian Kitchen, Lucinda Wine Bar, Omotenashi."
What is your favorite dish and where is your favorite restaurant to have it?
I don't know if I have a favourite dish. I'm a spice freak - as mentioned above - so my emotional support food is Indonesian ayam and sambol. For that I head to Little Indonesia on Sussex Street in Sydney. I'd love to explore more of the culinary traditions of Indonesia itself; it would be so thrilling to see that country make more of a global gastronomic mark.
I also tend to swoon for individual ingredients, such as sunshine-sweet Rajasthani peas, which I recently tried at the very excellent The Johri in Jaipur. But you won't ever get me to say that my favourite food is 'pizza' or 'poutine' or 'pani puri'. Whatever I ate last, if it was done well, is my favourite.
Who is an up-and-coming chef you are keeping an eye on?
I'm always hesitant to call any chef 'up and coming' because most of the time they have toiled for years before they achieve public visibility. But I think Henry Onesemo, from Tala in Auckland, is about to make some big, bold, Islander waves on the southern hemisphere food scene. He distils Samoan food into a menu of energy and joy - referencing roadside barbecues and instant ramen - and everyone should add it to their bottom-of-the-world itineraries.
Who is a food expert whose restaurant recommendations you’d like to see?
Claudia de Brito, one of my World's 50 Best Restaurants colleagues based in Dubai, is an excellent person to have a food conversation with. She's smart and encouraging and she tastes nuances in food that many miss. She also howls Les Miserables hits with me in the backs of Ubers (which may account for my rapidly plummeting Uber rating). What else could you ask for in a food friend.
