With the dust settled on Good Food Guide awards season this week, the next batch of contenders is already rolling out, led by ambitious Vito’s at the old Rockpool site on Bridge Street.
Inspired by New York’s famed American-Italian restaurants from the 1950s and ’60s, Vito’s has also signed former Good Food Guid e Chef of the Year Lauren Eldridge to run the pastry section. It opens Friday, October 30, with one of the most bejewelled restaurant interiors in Sydney.
If the mosaic “restrooms” floor sign at Vito’s toilet entrance glitters, that’s because the tiles are made of real gold. “Detail” is a word owner Brett Sergeant uses often at Vito’s, where they’ve splashed $8 million transforming the CBD site where Neil Perry relocated Rockpool in 2013. Among the lashings of Queensland maple joinery and rust-red velvet banquettes, even the regulation fire equipment and air-conditioning units are concealed in custom-built vintage-style cabinetry.
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Vito’s is the most ambitious project to date from Sergeant and his partners James Wicks and Iris Kleimann at Sunday Co., which also operates Morrisons Oyster Bar & Grill on George Street and Whalebridge restaurant at Circular Quay. It’s against type in a tough market, but Sergeant doesn’t see Vito’s as a gamble as much as a long-term investment. “We have a 25-year lease,” he said.
They haven’t skimped in the kitchen, either. Australian-born head chef Michael Fox worked at upscale Italian-American restaurant Carbone, skipping between New York and Hong Kong. He was also The Age Good Food Guide ‘s Young Chef of the Year in 2010; Eldridge was named Young Chef of the Year in 2015, and took home the Good Food Guide ’s Chef of the Year certificate in 2025 for her work at Newtown’s Paisano & Daughters precinct.
“It’s a reflection of this project to get a person of Lauren’s calibre on board,” Fox said. While collaborating on the opening dessert menu, the duo had similar tiramisu recipes but used different alcohol. “We’ve combined the recipes by pretty much putting all of it [the different alcohol] in,” Eldridge said.
Fox uses sour cream in his cheesecake, Eldridge leans on goat’s cheese. The goat won out. The bombe Alaska has a core of rainbow sponge, and Eldridge was schooled in cannoli-making early in her career.
Fox and group culinary director David Clarke have created an opening savoury menu with a 10-layer lasagne, beef carpaccio with truffle and hazelnut, and plenty of seafood, pasta and meat. “We want to take those staples, something everyone does, and elevate them,” Fox said. The pork chop, for instance, is served with five different peppers.
By Sydney CBD standards, there is some reasonable pricing too, such as a $52 wagyu flank, and $29 for casarecce pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe. Sergeant said Vito’s will also launch a late-night menu, but there’ll be a short wait for the first evening slice, with the pizza oven firing up in a week or two.
Tapping the nostalgia and grandeur of Italian-American dining has been a long festering ambition for the restaurateur. “I want it to be a place you walk in and say to yourself, ‘oh, why did I drive?’”
11 Bridge Street, Sydney, sundayco.com/venues/vitos
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