The much-anticipated south-west Metro line opened Friday in Sydney, bringing easy access to more of the Good Food Guide ’s reviewed and recommended cafes and restaurants.
This compilation of 30 venues takes you on a culinary tour, stopping at each of the 10 converted Metro stations from Marrickville to Bankstown to try standout dishes and hard-to-find cuisines at all price points.
You’ll find two school friends making exceptional pizza in Hurlstone Park, some of Sydney’s best baklava at a Persian patisserie in Lakemba, and the go-to for crackling pork banh mi in Bankstown. All but five venues have been vetted independently by anonymous critics and the remainder are top of Good Food’s must-try list.
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Arrive early to score a weekend table at Banh Cuon Ba Oanh. The bright-yellow corner shop attracts long lines for its specialty dish, banh cuon: silky sheets of paper-thin steamed rice noodles served with fillings such as steamed pork and fried strips of beef. Owner Minh Thuy Nguyen named the eatery after her mother, Ba Oanh, who spent decades making the banh cuon in Northern Vietnam.
They still cook together in the small restaurant kitchen, alongside several other family members, and recently expanded the menu to include new fillings. “A lot of people like the fried cinnamon pork because it has more flavour,” Nguyen says. She recommends trying the free-range chicken congee for a hearty breakfast. Check the weather before visiting – seating is almost exclusively outdoors, with limited coverage.
Backed by his Peloponnese heritage and experience at Sydney’s top butcheries, chef-owner Timothy Cassimatis brings years of work to the plate at this hatted yeeros restaurant – an epic journey that makes queuing well worth the wait.
The odyssey to a perfect bite begins with the meats: salted, brined, marinated for days. Or, for the lamb kontosouvli, wrapped in a lace of caul fat that renders as it’s grilled over coals for up to six hours. From there, you build.
A carb to carry it: sourdough pita, always fired in the wood oven to order, or triple-cooked chips fried in beef tallow. Some accoutrements, like earthy fava dip or the Athinika salata. Then, to cut through, toursi: snappy house-made pickles of bursting pepperoncini and thick aniseed cucumbers. BYO is $8 per person.
12 Dudley Street, Marrickville, olympicmeats.shop
There’s something refreshingly old-fashioned about Frankly Nick’s, the pizza restaurant opened by childhood friends Georgio Panousos and William Kay in 2025. There are tomato-red tables, neighbourly hospitality and a single-page menu, including stretchy cheese and garlic rolls and puffy-edged pizza pies that range from classic to “sacrilege”, a twist on ham and pineapple that sees the fruit infused with whisky liqueur.
36 Floss Street, Hurlstone Park, franklynicks.com.au
To understand the cuisine of Mauritius, just turn a bowl upside down. The best place to do it? Le Dodo Affamer in Canterbury, currently Sydney’s only restaurant showcasing the island nation’s food. Order a bol renversé and much is revealed in one quick flip.
The French name hints at the country’s history, but the stir-fried chicken and soy sauce cascading through rice grains reflect centuries of Chinese presence in Mauritius. Basmati, meanwhile, nods to the island’s majority Indo-Pakistani population. Elsewhere, the rougaille (a spiced tomato sauce) in the dholl puri, presented as a flatbread stuffed with pulses and pickles, speaks to French and African Creole links.
Bring a group, split a salmi (described as a kind of Mauritian coq au vin), finish with a shock-pink Lamington-like gato rouge, then plot when you can come back.
169 Canterbury Road, Canterbury, instagram.com/ledodoaffamer
Foli Bakery is hidden between a smash repair shop and an empty warehouse in the Campsie industrial precinct. Head baker Yewon “Yenny” Yung takes inspiration from French, Japanese and Korean baking to create precision baked goods, each one as beautiful as it is delicious.
Customers queue on weekends for little rectangular slices of carrot cake with house-made carrot jam and carefully piped frosting; cookies filled with pistachio nuts and raspberries; and golden loaves of pumpkin ciabatta bread.
Eunseok Lee, who co-owns the bakery with Taeho Kang and Junsoo Park, says it’s a research and development facility for the group’s Darlinghurst cafes Eef and Theeca. He recommends trying the traditional Japanese shio pan, otherwise known as salt bread.
32A Harp Street, Campsie, instagram.com/folibakery
Within two weeks of launching the Instagram account Smeed al Ma’amoul in March 2022, Serena Tajjour received more than 2000 orders for her mother’s date-filled shortbread semolina cookies, and the business has steadily grown since.
At her first cafe , on Burwood Road, Tajjour serves ma’amoul (modernised with fillings such as marshmallow and raspberry) with kahweh – the cardamon-spiced Lebanese coffee – in a small shop with scalloped green awnings. There’s a retail section with imported rose and orange blossom water, merchandise designed by Tajjour (a graphic designer by trade), and an old Lebanese cookbook to peruse, held together with tape.
The hospitality is warm, the coffee is strong, and the pistachio ma’maoul becomes magical when warmed up, served with spoonfuls of clotted cream.
422 Burwood Road, Belmore, smeed.com.au
Very little has changed at El Manara since it opened back in 1989. And why should it, when the falafel are exemplary, the fattoush is crunchy and colourful, the chicken shish arrives juicy as all get-out, and the ultra-creamy foule delivers all the earthy comfort of long-simmered chickpeas and fava beans?
This is no-nonsense cooking with generosity and value at the fore, a magnet for tradies grabbing kebabs, as well as local families and longtime regulars who treat it like a second home, swiping Lebanese bread through smoky baba ghanoush and picking at the unmissable house sausages with reckless abandon.
All the while, owner-chef Amir Sayah’s gentle smile and abiding presence in the gloriously retro time capsule of a room amp up the feel-good factor tenfold.
143 Haldon Street, Lakemba, elmanaralebaneserestaurant.com.au
This Bengali restaurant has long been on the must-try list. To call it eye-catching is an understatement: the venue is a riot of colour and neon lighting, demanding attention from drivers on King Georges Road. It’s the kind of place to gather with friends over platters of crispy fuchka, filled with a textural mixture of spiced potatoes, chickpeas and herbs; or chaat loaded with crushed shingaras (fried vegetable dumplings), vegetables and a fiercely guarded secret sauce.
77 King Georges Road, Wiley Park, instagram.com/hang.outz
Afandi is a small cafe on a quiet suburban street, overlooking the metro line, where the lights stay on and the Turkish coffee continues to pour until midnight. It’s said to serve the best knafeh in Sydney, which is no small feat given the popularity of the Middle Eastern dessert.
You might know it from the Lakemba Night Markets, where it becomes a visual spectacle of gold spun pastry, sliced and pulled from warm pans to reveal a layer of molten cheese, stretching as high as the vendor’s arm.
Everything here is made from scratch, prepared over the course of three days and then cooked to order. The final product is delicate and delicious, garnished with chopped green pistachios and served with a small glass jug of unflavoured qatir (sugar syrup).
19 Breust Place, Punchbowl, facebook.com/afandicoffeeonsand
In Sydney’s pho stakes, An Restaurant usually comes top of the big, noodly pile. For advocates, look no further than the mix of locals, families, expats and pilgrims who fill the canteen space from daybreak each morning.
This is fast-paced, large-scale dining, where the only choices are between beef or chicken, then which parts to include, ranging from sliced fillet through to combinations featuring rare meat, paper-thin bible tripe and satisfyingly chewy tendon for bo, or young eggs plus all the good organs for ga.
Whatever your flavour, broths are rich and heady, bean shoots plump and basil large, with an icy che ba mau a colourful, coconutty finish.
27 Greenfield Parade, Bankstown, anrestaurant.com.au
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