Watermans drops the time limit as Barangaroo’s new Eastern Med crowd-pleaser
That classic, slow 7pm dinner has been getting harder to find in Sydney, as more restaurants lock into two sittings and strict two-hour turns.
Now the team behind some of the city’s best-known diners is pushing back on the stopwatch approach with its newest opening, Watermans at Barangaroo. Instead of hustling guests in and out, they’re bringing back the long-form night out.
“You can book whenever you like,” restaurateur Nick Hildebrandt from Bentley Restaurant Group told Good Food of its new venture, Watermans. The venue opens at Barangaroo on Monday, November 24.
“We don’t want to be kicking people out, we want them to stay the whole night.”
Watermans is an eastern Mediterranean restaurant in the One Sydney Harbour development, tucked just behind Watermans Cove. It’s the latest addition to the
Bentley hospitality stable, which already includes CBD fine-diner Bentley, Asian-inspired King Clarence and Eleven Barrack, recently named New Restaurant of the Year.
Hildebrandt says Sydney’s boom in openings has spread diners more thinly across the city, changing how operators think about hospitality. “So you [need to] look after them,” he told Good Food.
He agrees that the churn of multiple sittings at in-demand spots has gone too far. The starting point for Watermans, he says, was putting “guest experience” first, alongside securing chef Darryl Martin, whose food they admired from his time at now-closed Marrickville favourite Barzaari.
In the kitchen, Martin’s bold flavours meet the polish of Hildebrandt’s long-time business partner, chef Brent Savage. Together they’ve been playing with eastern Med staples, including musakhan, a Palestinian chicken dish usually served with bread. At Watermans it becomes a roasted chicken number, coated in potato flakes instead of bread.
They’ve also put their spin on taramasalata, now so common on Sydney menus it’s practically a requirement. At Watermans, it arrives with Greek Easter bread reimagined as tiny slider buns topped with taramasalata and roe. “We pulled back on the sweetness of the Easter bread and brush it with pomegranate molasses,” Martin said.
The 150-seat restaurant marks a return to familiar ground for Hildebrandt and Savage. From 2016 until last year, they ran award-winning seafood restaurant Cirrus just a few steps away, before the lease ended.
This time, Savage stresses, “Watermans isn’t a seafood restaurant”, but the menu definitely flirts with the shoreline: think prawns and saffron orzo, pickled octopus and wood-fired scallop with pomegranate and brown butter.
Despite a long track record, the pair remain very hands-on in the lead-up. “I’ve been at Flower Power getting plants, and Brent has been painting,” Hildebrandt said.
It’s been a reshaping year for the group. In March, they sold plant-based Yellow to its long-time head chef, Sander Nooij, and his business partner. Later, they closed Monopole and stepped away from Brasserie 1930 at Capella Sydney.
They describe the new direction as “pruning and preparing for growth”, focusing on venues they fully control and that meet a certain size and scale. That includes February’s smash opening, Eleven Barrack.
While he has sympathy for smaller operators, Hildebrandt says sub-60-seat venues no longer stack up for their business model. “You either need to be an owner-operator [working in the venue] or turn over the tables two or three times to survive. It’s part of the reason we let Yellow go.”
Watermans
Open lunch and dinner daily
R1/88 Barangaroo Avenue, Barangaroo
Jonathan Jackson, 25th November 2025
