Aria Restaurant Sydney

We had the lunch tasting menu with matching wines and it was absolutely divine. What a fabulous way to experience five star cuisine. While each course is small it’s packed with the most amazing flavours and the wine pairings were phenomenal. The service was impeccable and the explanation of each dish and wine was superb. I’d come back here in a heartbeat.

So the short review - I wouldn’t recommend Aria. There was nothing that made me go wow and the dishes were average at best. A bit more detail - the oysters and the squab were tasty and the veal was okay, however everything else was really lacking considering that this is meant to be a fine dining restaurant and costs about $220 each for the tasting menu. Some dishes lacked flavour, one dish was dry and the service was not amazing. You were left almost waiting to be noticed and it seems that their selling point is the view of the opera house. I’m sad to say that it is not somewhere I would return to.

Went with my partner and we booked in advance to have a table with a view and the tasting menu. The person who seated us was a bit rude and seated us in the back with no view. We said we had requested a view but apparently that doesn’t matter. To make it worse, they had so many open tables in the front (we felt not good enough for them to get nice seats even though we were there early). The other servers were brilliant from then on. But then the food was very underwhelming in taste and extremely small portions (even for a fine dining restaurant). Thank goodness there was bread!