A restaurant at Brunswick Heads has been named best restaurant in regional NSW.
It and another at Cabarita have each scored two hats in the 2019 Good Food Guide, with a further three in the region each receiving a hat.
The second annual national version of the guide. was released last week.
It gave top honours of NSW’s Best Regional Restaurant to Fleet at Brunswick Heads, which received a remarkable score of 17.5/20.
Just a handful of restaurants in Australia get more: the ‘three-hat’ awards that cut in at 18 were given out to just seven establishments nationwide.
Not far below Fleet, on 16, was Cabarita Beach’s Paper Daisy.
The Northern Rivers’ one-hatters this year are Byron at Byron, Newrybar’s Harvest and Lennox Head’s Shelter, which were each awarded 15 points.
Bangalow’s Town also made it into the guide but this year just missed out on a hat, with a score of 14.5.
The Guide of independent, anonymous reviews is written by a panel of trusted restaurant critics and recognises the best Australian restaurants nationally with ‘hats’, symbolised by a chef’s toque.
To achieve a hat is a pinnacle of a chef’s career and a restaurant’s history, and the term ‘hatted’ has become embedded in the Australian lexicon.
More than 500 restaurants from across the country were reviewed for this year’s Guide, with 264 of these receiving hat status, ranging from one to three.
To secure a coveted spot in the Guide, restaurants in New South Wales and Victoria must score at least 14 out of 20, while all other states must score a minimum of 15.
The catalogue of influential Guide editors includes founding editors Claude Forell in Melbourne and Leo Schofield in Sydney – along with Terry Durack, Jill Dupleix and Matthew Evans – who have charted the growth of the restaurant industry in Australia and helped to shape it.
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