Bea

Barangaroo House is an ambitious three-storey venue from Matt Moran and Solotel containing a crowd-pleasing ground floor bar, House, and a ritzy rooftop bar, Smoke.

Between them is the pièce de résistance: Bea, a fine-dining restaurant headed up by executive chef Tom Haynes. He’s kept menu descriptions deliberately simple so guests can focus on the flavours of each dish, rather than the techniques. There are substantial meat dishes, such as the one-and-a-half kilogram Rangers Valley tomahawk steak, but seafood and vegetable dishes are the stars. Indigenous Australian ingredients appear on many plates, including the Spanish mackerel with saltbush and cucumber, and the kangaroo served with munthari (native cranberries) and blueberries. If it all sounds a bit overwhelming, the nine-course set menu could be a good choice.

As befits a restaurant of this ambition, the drinks list is encyclopaedic. Like the food menu, it’s easy to get lost in the pages and pages of outstanding wines from Australia and abroad, but do consider a cocktail to warm up. It’s not every day you get the chance to drink a Wagyu Old Fashioned made with Wagyu-infused bourbon, or a Truffle Whisky Sour with truffled honey.