The Chippendale wood-fired spot is our critic’s choice for a long lunch

I don’t splash out on caviar too often but, when I do, it’s a thumb-sized quenelle of the stuff, ink-black and shimmering on top of a cube of dense omelette. Every surface of the baked egg is covered in butter-intensive sweetcorn puree and to say the $65 dish is “rich” is like saying Kerry Packer “could be a bit moody”. There’s nothing quite like it in Sydney, and there isn’t a restaurant in Sydney quite like Ester.

It’s my recommendation to mates visiting from overseas who ask, “Where’s the one place I should eat?” It’s where hatted chefs go for a three-bottle lunch of twice-cooked duck ($100). It’s where Nigella loves the contrast between hot, craggy rolls of fermented potato bread and trout roe, kefir cream and cool dashi jelly ($25).

And it’s where I go when I’ve been eating (relatively) healthily for a couple of months and feel as if I’ve earned an afternoon with “crepe brulee” ($20). That’s a creme patissiere custard-filled pancake with a surface that’s all snap and crackle, drenched in lemon caramel.

God, I’m starting to make the place sound like some beurre blanc-smothered orgy where you could imagine seeing a Channel Seven producer slurping bone marrow in the corner. Throw another tomahawk on the barbie. But Ester is nothing like that at all.

Since owner-chef Mat Lindsay opened the Chippendale restaurant in 2013, it has been a trailblazer of modern Australian cooking. A bolthole of singular, invigorating dishes, each touched in some way by a wood-fired oven that coaxes new flavours from familiar ingredients.

(Well, okay, so there is beurre blanc. The butter sauce covers a $55 forequarter of roast kingfish – blistered skin-on collar and head – which you’re encouraged to slice and spoon into lettuce cups so fresh I wonder if there’s a hydroponic setup on the roof. A $24 glass of Von Winning 2022 Riesling is your best friend at this juncture.)

In the past 11 years, Lindsay has also opened fire-powered wine bar Poly in Surry Hills, launched bread and pastry venture A.P Bakery in partnership with old Ester colleague Dougal Muffet and, most recently, published a cookbook (way more user-friendly than most restaurant-based cookbooks, by the way, which are often just expensive business cards).

After more than a decade of serving his “blood sausage sanga” ($14), the chef has also earned the right to offer an “Ester classics” set menu. One hundred and sixty-five dollars buys you that steamed bread-swaddled snag, potato roll with trout roe, chicken fat-enhanced roast oysters, king prawns with shrimp butter, highly marbled wagyu and a few other bits and pieces.

It’s a fine place to start if it’s your first visit to the stone-grey, pared-down dining room, but then so are natural oysters slicked with a finger-lime mignonette ($7 each) and a Poor Toms gin martini ($25). It’s a martini all other martinis can be held up against – deathly cold and dry, with three fat olives and brine on the side.

Twice-cooked pork belly is glazed with burnt honey and set in a husk of melting, roast leek with macadamia cream ($55).

Duck dumplings are braised in a handsome clay pot and intensely flavoured with a broth that speaks of smoke, fish bones, black pepper and tamari ($32). The six-wonton serve glows with all the colours of a dying sun, and it’s probably not a coincidence that Lindsay studied graphic design before taking a job at Rockpool to pay the bills. Few chefs plate with more confidence and definition and it’s rare that you’ll encounter an ingredient that has no business being there.

The service is warm, informed and invested, although I’m not sure why wine ordered by the glass is poured away from the table. It’s a cracking little booze offering, so why not go all the way?

My only other grumble is a soundtrack that occasionally verges into Smooth FM territory. Thumbs up for the Beastie Boys, but if I never hear Moondance or Stuck in the Middle with You again, it will still be too soon.

Stealers Wheel aside, Ester is a place where you’ll walk away feeling nourished, nurtured and reasonably stuffed. A place with a menu that largely goes where it pleases, but also feels like it couldn’t exist anywhere else but a backstreet in Sydney.

Book a late lunch. Bring a group. Order a martini. Order two. Drink riesling and at least consider the caviar.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine