Hottest eatery an odds-on winner

A restaurant in a casino serving Korean-American food, named after a Taiwanese-Japanese businessman and run by a British chef for his Manhattan-based boss has been anointed Australia's hottest.

This unlikely scenario has given Momofuku Seiobo at Sydney's Star casino its unique and blisteringly hot DNA.

Haven't been there? Not many have: the restaurant seats about 40 diners at a time and you have to join a virtual queue online to get a booking. But the booking is gold.

And unlike some other high-profile imports Gordon Ramsay's failed Maze, for one Momofuku works. Better, we think, than the Manhattan original.

Momofuku was among an elite group of restaurants honoured last night at the inaugural The Weekend Australian Magazine Hot 50 Awards, which take the pulse of Australia's contemporary dining landscape. The awards precede the magazine's much-awaited annual Hot 50 list this weekend.

The 10 award winners represent a broad cross-section of Australia's most forward-thinking restaurant talent. Melbourne's Andrew McConnell, the man behind five exceptional restaurants in his home town, was anointed Hottest Chef.

This year, McConnell added to an already impressive armada of restaurants by relaunching the Builders Arms Hotel in inner-city Fitzroy, with its rollicking front bar and bistro and refined dining room Moon Under Water. The Builders Arms raised the bar for food pubs in Australia, the judges said.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was a dish from internationally renowned chef Peter Gilmore at Quay - a complex pairing of pork and scallop - that shared the honour of Australia's hottest. Hadleigh Troy at Amuse, in Perth, impressed the judges equally with a smoking egg and mushroom combination.

In a move away from traditional judging of wine in restaurants, The Weekend Australian Magazine award focuses not on a list per se but on the wine experience as a whole. The judges recruited renowned wine writer and author Max Allen to appraise a shortlist of restaurants with exceptional wine programs. The Hottest Wine Experience award went to Sydney veteran Tetsuya's.

The Weekend Australian Magazine editor Christine Middap said the big advantage of the Hot 50 list was its immediacy.

"Unlike restaurant guide-books, with deadlines that often make their listings redundant before publication, we were still adding and subtracting from this list last week," she said.

While the awards and list are dominated by relatively young restaurants, there are notable exceptions. Melbourne's Cafe di Stasio, a restaurant about to celebrate its quarter-century, won Hottest Classic.

But it was the relatively new Sixpenny in Sydney's Stanmore that was recognised for Hottest Service. At Sixpenny, it's often the chefs who deliver your food.

Hottest Value went to Adelaide's runaway success story Press Food & Wine; Hottest Design to maverick Maurice Terzini's converted warehouse Neild Avenue, in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney; Hottest People's Choice elected via online polling to Melbourne CBD diner Hare and Grace.

The full Hot 50 list, along with a state-by-stage guide, will be published this Saturday in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

Source: The Australian, 24 July 2012