Our must-dine list of nation's top restaurants fills a tall order
Everybody's talkin' - about restaurants, that is.
VIDEO: Preview the Hottest 50 Restaurants of 2013
'Tis the season for the annual food guides from a flurry of sources, stoking the flames of a national obsession with eating out in hot restaurants despite a cold economic climate.
Some are books with long lead times, a problem in such a volatile industry; some are supplements with similar shortcomings; ours is a no-rankings snapshot of the hottest restaurants in Australia right now, including some that opened just a few weeks ago.
For our third consecutive Hot 50 edition of The Weekend Australian Magazine, to be published this Saturday, we have refined the "hot" ethos yet again.
A hot restaurant is one that provides conviviality, enjoyment, food we want to tell our friends about, service that makes us feel good, value, and an approach to wine that reflects knowledge without pretension.
It's a tall order.
As the only Australian newspaper to provide a national restaurant perspective, there are obvious challenges to compiling such a wide-roaming list; there are also rewards.
We don't pretend to visit every restaurant in the country every year: we are a deliberately small team, not a committee.
We have our own perspective, and it rejects a numerical ranking system; any system, in fact, that seeks to compare the apples of high-end dining with the oranges of on-trend social hubs where food is the essence. We can't tell you what the "best" restaurants in Australia are, but we reckon we can tell you which ones are pulsing on the radar screen.
One of the rewards of compiling the Hot 50 each year is the process of whittling down a shortlist to recognise some of the outstanding candidates in our award categories. It's not a science, but we pool a lot of qualitative research.
In other words, our tight group of editors, including respected Sydney food journalists Elizabeth Meryment and Simon Thomsen, have done a lot of objective eating out this year.
It's a gruesome edit. There were a lot of good restaurants left on the cutting-room floor, and some that never even made it into contention.
Frankly, some restaurants we visited this year were "cold". Where it gets really hard, though, is when a restaurant ticks most but not all of the boxes.
Clearly, the plum award is for Hottest Restaurant, closely followed by Hottest Chef.
This year, we have nominated the Hottest Restaurants state-by-state but, for the national title, we came up with a shortlist of four.
If you're not excited by eating in one of these restaurants, you might want to turn instead to the sports section.
Source: The Australian, 21 August 2013
