The Chippendale wood-fired spot is our critic’s choice for a long lunch

I don't slather caviar too often, but when I do, it's a thumb-sized quenelle, inky black and glistening atop a cube of dense omelette. Every surface of the baked egg is covered in butter-intensive sweet corn mash, and calling the $65 dish “rich” is like saying Kerry Packer “could be a little cranky.” There is nothing like it in Sydney, and in Sydney there is no restaurant like Ester.

It is my recommendation to colleagues visiting from abroad who ask, “Where is the one place I should eat?” It's where chefs in hats go for a three-bottle lunch of twice-cooked duck ($100). It's where Nigella loves the contrast between warm, crisp rolls of fermented potato bread and omelette eggs, kefir cream and fresh dashi jelly ($25).

And it's where I go when I've been eating (relatively) healthily for a couple of months and feel like I've earned an afternoon of crepe brulee ($20). It's a custard-filled pancake with a flaky, crackling surface, drenched in lemon caramel.

God, I'm starting to make the place sound like a beurre blanc-smothered orgy where you can imagine a Channel Seven producer drinking bone marrow in the corner. Throw another tomahawk at the barbie. But Ester is not like that at all.

Since chef and owner Mat Lindsay opened the Chippendale restaurant in 2013, he has been a pioneer of modern Australian cuisine. A hole of unique and stimulating dishes, each touched in some way by a wood-fired oven that coaxes new flavors from familiar ingredients.

(Well, okay, so here is beurre blanc Butter sauce coats a $55 front quarter of roasted fish (skin blistered on the neck and head), which you're encouraged to slice and spoon into lettuce cups so fresh I wonder if there's a hydroponics setup on the roof . A $24 glass of 2022 Von Winning Riesling is your best friend right now.)

In the past 11 years, Lindsay has also opened the Poly mulled wine bar in Surry Hills, launched the bread and pastry company AP Bakery in partnership with old colleague Ester Dougal Muffet, and most recently has published a cookbook (much easier to use than most restaurant cookbooks, by the way, which are often just expensive business cards).

After more than a decade of serving his “sanga de botifarra” ($14), the chef has also earned the right to offer an “Ester classics” menu. One hundred and sixty-five dollars buys you that sausage wrapped in steamed bread, potato roll with omelette eggs, fried oysters in chicken fat, shrimp in shrimp butter, heavily marbled wagyu, and a few other bits.

It's a good place to start if it's your first visit to the diminutive, stone-gray dining room, but so are the natural oysters with a lime mignonette ($7 each) and a Poor Toms gin martini ($25). It's a martini against all other martinis: deadly cold and dry, with three fat olives and brine on the side.

Twice-cooked pork belly is glazed with burnt honey and encased in a melted roasted leek shell with macadamia cream ($55).

Duck balls are braised in a beautiful clay pot and intensely flavored with a broth that speaks of smoke, herring bone, black pepper and tamari ($32). The six-wonton service glows with all the colors of a dying sun, and it's probably no coincidence that Lindsay studied graphic design before taking a job at Rockpool to pay the bills. Few chefs make dishes with more confidence and definition and it's rare that you come across an ingredient that has no interest.

The service is warm, knowledgeable and invested, although I don't know why the wine ordered by the glass is poured off the table. It's a small booze deal, so why not go all the way?

My only other complaint is a soundtrack that occasionally veers into Smooth FM territory. Kudos to the Beastie Boys, but if I never hear it Moondance or Stuck in the middle with you again, it will still be too soon.

Stealers Wheel aside, Ester is a place you'll leave feeling nurtured, nourished and reasonably stuffed. A place with a menu that pretty much goes where it wants, but also feels like it couldn't exist anywhere other than a side street in Sydney.

Book a late lunch. Bring a group. Order a martini. order two Drink riesling and at least consider the caviar.

This review was originally published on Have a great weekend magazine