The Foodies’ Guide to Sydney is our pick of this city’s – and some of the state’s – finest food providores. Whether you’re looking for a Middle Eastern spice mix, a certain fish for bouillabaisse, a low-gluten bread or German rye, you’ll most likely find it at one of the suppliers listed in here.
Demographers like to make little coloured maps showing where certain types of people cluster. What you’ll find among these 400 or so listings is a rainbow of flavours. The Foodies’ Guide reveals how remarkably diverse Sydney is, for while there are clusters of nationalities – Greeks in Petersham, Italians in Leichhardt and Five Dock – somewhere like Bankstown is a remarkable melting pot of nationalities, including Greek, Vietnamese and Lebanese. It offers probably the best food shopping in Sydney – just check the index, which lists stores by suburb, as well as in alphabetical order.
We’ve made clusters of certain types of stores – butchers, bakers, greengrocers and 34 other categories – and listed them alphabetically, but this year we’ve tried to streamline things. We’ve made some changes based on how we think people shop, so rather than clumping all the bakers together, stores with a focus on the flavours of a particular country are now listed in the World Food section under that nationality. We hope that will make it easier for you to find a particular ingredient from Spain or Russia, for example. We’ve included Halal and Jewish places too.
You’ll find maps of the stores featured at the back of the book, which is handy if you just happen to be in Bondi and are wondering what’s around, while to surprise and hopefully inspire you, we’ve laced the book with little snippets, including places where Sydney’s top chefs shop and tips on what to buy.
We hope you enjoy exploring the 2011 Foodies’ Guide to Sydney.