The Little Snail Restaurant

French, by the water, and worth every bit of the trip. That combination is rarer in Sydney than it should be, and this place has been doing it long enough that people plan around it rather than stumbling in.

Escargot to start, because it's in the name and because they're very good at it. Garlic and butter and bread to push through whatever's left, and the linguine beside it doing the same job with a fork.

The beef tenderloin comes out tender enough to cut with the side of a fork and seasoned lightly enough that you taste the meat, and the seafood plate is the one the whole table goes quiet for when it lands.

It's a three-course restaurant and it works best treated like one. Entree, main, dessert, in order, without anybody trying to build something clever out of the menu. Bread arrives early and keeps arriving, and by the time the mains turn up most tables have gone further into it than they meant to.

Dessert isn't an afterthought either. The crème brûlée cracks the way it's supposed to and somebody always asks for a second spoon.

This place has been going a very long time. It was on Broadway before it was here, and people who've been eating it fifteen years will tell you the food hasn't drifted, which is a rarer thing than food being good in the first place.

Lunch and dinner are two different evenings. The middle of the day brings visitors and gets loud, and at night it fills with people who've been coming for years and settles into something much quieter. Pyrmont has changed around it more than once and the restaurant has simply kept going through all of it, and you walk back out into a suburb that looks nothing like it did when this place opened.