The 41st SMH Good Food Guide launched today

The 41st annual Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide will be launched this afternoon at a chef-studded awards ceremony at Carriageworks in Darlington.

The 2026 Guide will feature more than 600 independent reviews of restaurants, bars, pubs and cafes in NSW and the ACT across various price points, cuisines, styles and suburbs, making it the largest SMH Guide published.

More than 500 industry leaders are expected to attend the event, where awards including restaurant of the year, new restaurant of the year and cafe of the year are announced alongside all the Good Food hats – from one to the pinnacle of three.

For the first time, the Guide – presented by Oceania Cruises and T2 Tea – will include a list of 115 essential restaurants that define dining out in NSW and the ACT right now.

This Critics’ Picks collection will be published in a free 80-page liftout in Tuesday’s newspaper, and is also available in the Good Food app. Since launching last year, the app is considered the home of the Good Food Guide and is where readers can search the full A-Z list of reviews using map functionality.

Diversity of cuisine, geography and price point were considered when creating the Critics’ Picks list, which includes some hatted venues.

“Throughout its history, Good Food has awarded hats to restaurants that scored highly across food, service, setting and value,” says David Matthews, who co-edited the Guide alongside Callan Boys. “But the more we talk about it, the more we find that although they represent a level of excellence, hats can’t paint the whole picture.”

Boys says the list of essential restaurants responds to the changing needs of Australian diners by recommending everything from fine-dining restaurants to food court favourites.

“Questions such as ‘Is Gumshara still the most important ramen shop in Haymarket?’ or ‘Do we want to include Olympic Meats or Olympus Dining?’ would regularly come up in meetings,” he says.

“Hatted or not, they’re the places we urge you to visit, either to discover something new, to be reminded of how our cities, towns and suburbs have evolved (and are still evolving), or to luxuriate in the pleasure of dining somewhere at its peak.”

The Guide will also include comprehensive regional dining round-ups, stretching from the Northern Rivers to the Sapphire Coast. They contain tips on where to get everything including a coffee, an excellent baked good, a beer or a full-blown meal.

All reviews go live on the Good Food app on Monday night following the conclusion of the ceremony. Boys says the digitised Guide means readers can explore reviews on their phone with up-to-date opening hours and a location-based “nearby” function to locate recommended restaurants in their area – much like a personalised Google map. They can also filter for cuisine types and dietary requirements, and search via signature collections including one-hat, two-hat and three-hat recommendations.

“It comes in handy when you’re travelling and in, say, Newcastle and want to know where the best sandwich is without having to wade through Google,” says Boys.

The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide 2026 Awards ceremony will be live-blogged via the SMH from 3pm, and the 2026 edition of the Guide will be available on the Good Food app from 8pm. A free 80-page Good Food Guide magazine will be inserted in the Herald tomorrow.

The Good Food app is free for premium subscribers of the SMH and also available as a standalone subscription. You can download the Good Food app here.