T2 Tea Restaurant of the Year: Corner 75

Randwick

It’s fitting that in their restoration of a 40-year-old Hungarian-Australian institution, Jean-Paul El Tom, Alex Kelly and Dan Puskas kept the jersey of Ferenc Puskas on the wall: FIFA’s annual award for the year’s most beautiful goal is named for the legendary Hungarian footballer, and in sticking the landing on refreshing an icon in a way that’s both sympathetic to its past and open-minded about its future, the Corner 75 team have scored an incredible winner.

It’s for this reason that our Restaurant of the Year award – our Puskas Award, if you will – goes to them. Sydney is a city starved of institutions, where restaurants more readily shut up shop than change hands. In committing to the project, the Corner 75 team have recognised the intangible things that restaurants bring to the table, pulled them off the walls, cleaned them up, then put them back in a way that’s still recognisable but also entirely new.

Tables overflow with langos, whipped sunflower dip framed with crudites, and Borrowdale pork schnitzel puffed up like a blanket, from chef Carley Scheidegger’s kitchen. Meanwhile, somm and restaurant manager Alice Tremayne adds Hungarian and Eastern European wines to her list. Regulars keep returning, while newcomers are discovering what they’ve been missing. What a goal!