Sydney’s far north hasn’t traditionally been a must-stop destination on the small bar circuit. But Brodie Stewart and Brett Strauss want to change all that. “We did a bar in Lindfield called The Blackout,” Strauss explains. “One of the major things we got from that was that a lot of the patrons from the Upper North Shore were coming down to Lindfield. We thought well, why not give the residents of the Upper Upper North Shore something to call their own?”

So, the team behind The Blackout and the Chippendale Hotel created a space for Turramurra locals to ‘mull around and have a couple of glasses of wine,’ called, fittingly, The Far North. Once an old Thai Restaurant, the venue has been given a warm and welcoming conversion. “We basically bought as much timber as we could and filled the inside,” says Strauss.

The menu, designed by chef Gary Oliver, is unusually global: it spans Chinese dumplings to a curry chicken hot pot; sang choi bao to tacos; South American chorizo to lamb chops and American-style ribs.

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Twenty unusual wines will be available by the glass at any one time, with a particular focus on South American drops from, say, Uruguay and Chile. “Sometimes you’ll come in and you won’t recognise any of the reds, and sometimes you’ll know you’ll have your shiraz and cabernet,” says Strauss. “There are some varieties that people won’t know, but if we’re pouring by the glass at $9, people absolutely die when they’re into it.”

Strauss reckons he’s already done a little bit to change the North. “Before there was the Greengate Hotel, and that was it,” says Strauss triumphantly. “In the North Turramurra shopping strip, there are three bars now in the space of 50 metres, which is great.”

The Far North

270 Bobbin Head, Turramurra, Ku-ring-gai

Hours

Tue - Sat: 5pm - 11pm

Sun: 4pm - 10pm

thefarnorth.com.au