3 Best Restaurants in Sydney, New South Wales

You can find better basic Chinese food elsewhere in town, but for duck and pork, barbecue-loving Sydneysiders know that this is the place to come. The poultry hanging in the window are the only decoration at this small Chinatown staple, where the food is so fresh you can almost hear it clucking—make sure you sample the duck pancakes. Barbecued pork is the other featured dish, and the suckling pig is especially delicious. It's open from 11 am until late at night, when the average customers are large groups of mates sprawled at the Formica tables feeding their drunken munchies, or Chinatown chefs kicking back after a day in the kitchen. The service can be a little brusque, but it's all part of the low-budget charm.

For two hours—or as long as it takes for you to consume delicately steamed prawns, luscious mud crab with ginger and shallots, and pipis with black-bean sauce—you might as well be in Hong Kong. This place is heaven for seafood lovers, with wall-to-wall fish tanks filled with crab, lobster, abalone, and schools of barramundi, parrotfish, and coral trout. You won't have to ask if the food is fresh: most of it is swimming around you as you eat. Come for the big-ticket seafood or a simple meal of deep-fried duck. Supper is served until 4 am so it's popular with late-night revelers. It's not the prettiest of places and service can be hit-and-miss, but it has a legion of fans.

The culinary focus of this chic basement eatery—another of the restaurants owned by Neil Perry of Rockpool fame—is regional China. There are dishes from far-flung Yunnan, Hunan, and Sichuan provinces, and as the names suggests, they all have a kick. The food is meant to be shared, so pass around the ginger shallot crab, the pork belly, or the extra spicy hot and numbing crispy duck. It's a busy, trendy eatery (down a somewhat steep flight of stairs), so if you have to wait at the bar for a table, grab a cocktail and a spicy pork bun and take in the opium den ambience. Cocktails are named after the Chinese Zodiac; if you're born in the Year of the Dragon you might like to sip on a refreshing mix of lemongrass and rose soda, citrus, and Tanqueray gin.