In a poll of 26 Sydney chefs on their favourite dish of the year, Vin-Cenzo’s take on rigatoni con la pajata was the clear winner. In the trattorias of Rome, where the dish was created in the 1500s, tubes of rigatoni are served in a tomatoey ragu made with the intestines of an unweaned calf, with its mother’s milk still inside. But because milk-fed veal intestines are harder to come by in Sydney, the Darlo Italian joint re-creates the cucina povera classic with a finta (“fake”) ragu of veal tripe, sweetbreads, ricotta and mint. Still, the city’s chefs can’t get enough. 

Offal’s gear-shifting turn from “low-key” to “take notice” is evident at other new Sydney restaurants, too. Grandfathers’ take on a Sichuan husband-and-wife salad, where pickled beef tongue and fried tripe is splashed with chilli and mala oil, has generated well-spiced buzz. At The Palomar, culinary director Mitch Orr grills skewers of Westholme Wagyu tongue with a date glaze. And the menu at Joe’s Tavern has a dedicated offal section – a big change from the site’s former ethos as plant-based eatery Flora. 

It’s not just in Sydney, either: Melbourne’s Le Pub launched in July with an oxtail, snail and bone marrow pie with a Flintstones-like bone bursting through the crust. Meanwhile, diners in Camberwell happily simmer duck intestines in Bizu’s Chongqing broths. In Brisbane, Broadsheet contributor Becca Wang declared Milquetoast’s stuffed pig’s trotter “one of the best dishes I’ve ever eaten”.

Are we on the cusp of a hot offal summer? If the answer is yes, it wouldn’t be the first time. Since the highly influential 1999 publication of Nose to Tail Eating by English chef Fergus Henderson of St John, no-waste dining has circulated in and out of fashion. But boiling entrails down to a mere trend overlooks their central and enduring role in many cuisines. 

“It’s just part of our culture,” says Chat Thai’s Palisa Anderson, who serves guay jub (a Thai Chinese noodle soup brimming with tripe, intestines, lung and liver) at the chain’s location at The Galeries in Sydney’s CBD. “We’ve been there for 26 years and we’ve had it on the menu for 26 years,” she says. 

As a child, Anderson ate “bowls and bowls” of guay jub with her mum throughout Thailand, tasting regional differences as they travelled. She recalls Thai marketplaces where butchers broke down animals and offered organ meat to stallholders first – a sharp contrast with Western perceptions of offal. “Rather than being second or third choice, [offal] was actually the choice choice,” she says. 

For Chat Thai’s version, ingredients of five-spice, daikon, lemongrass and makrut lime subdue the intestinal intensity while maximising the broth’s flavour. The restaurant also boils the intestines three times for good measure. “Intestines, if not cleaned well, can be really smelly,” says Anderson, who still counts guay jub as a favourite despite its labour intensity. “I’ve always really liked offal. I don’t remember having an ‘ick’ reaction to offal.”

Resistance to animal offcuts inspired Thi Le in the early days of her trailblazing Melbourne restaurant Anchovy. Le was “gobsmacked” that diners would happily eat European-style offal dishes such as Cumulus Inc’s black pudding or Movida’s morcilla, but shrank back when presented with the dishes’ Asian counterparts. So she created a Vietnamese version: pan-fried blood custard lightened with herbs like Vietnamese mint. “It became a catapult for our restaurant,” she says. “I love offal. It’s a great way to eat everything on the animal, and we should eat everything”.

Anchovy co-owner Jia-Yen Lee captures the contradictions surrounding offal in the pages of Viet Kieu, the cookbook she co-authored with Le, which includes recipes for stir-fried livers with flowering garlic, and stir-fried pickled mustard greens with intestines. Offal, she writes, is “prized by some and actively avoided by others, used as a measure of food adventure by those who can afford it, and as the only source of affordable protein by others”.

Prominent national dishes, like Vietnamese pho, can be a gateway to trying offal in other cuisines. Adetokunboh Adeniyi noticed this at his restaurant Little Lagos, where Vietnamese Australians were among his earliest supporters. His gizdodo stir-fry (“giz” for gizzards, “dodo” the Nigerian street name for plantains) became one of the restaurant’s most sought-after menu items. So did egusi – a spiced West African stew made with a variety of proteins, including offal – which took off on social media and still gets plenty of requests. “It was explosive on Tiktok. Everybody wanted to try it,” he says. 

Although Adeniyi has enjoyed a Ghanaian version at Afrikanbite, in Redbank Plains just outside Brisbane, he believes the city’s diners seem generally “less excited” about offal than Melbourne and Sydney crowds. Brisbane’s smaller size and likely “lack of exposure” could be reasons why.

Geography affects how diners react to offal, according to Sydney restaurateur Alessandro Pavoni. At Vineria Luisa in the inner west, tonnarelli alle rigaglie (pasta with chicken giblets) “flies” out of the kitchen and has been winning diners over with every strand. But if the dish was served at Cibaria on the northern beaches, it would be a different story. “I wouldn’t sell any,” he says.

As a former inner westie who used to live in Leichhardt (aka Sydney’s Little Italy), Pavoni believes the area’s diversity of multicultural hubs and general open-mindedness lets him offer Italian dishes that aren’t mainstream. Then again, some people automatically reject offal regardless of where they live – including his wife and business partner. “[She’ll just say] ‘I don’t like this stuff.’” 

Conversely, Elvis Abrahanowicz says it’s “impossible” to sell sweetbreads at Joe’s Tavern, despite being one suburb away from Luisa and sweetbreads bring “possibly the greatest thing you can eat”. The chef’s love of the genre comes from his childhood in Argentina, where “offal is big” – from chinchulines (grilled intestines) to cow udders and brains. (Raisins were the only thing Abrahanowicz struggled with as a kid. He’s fine with them now, though.)

One of the heroes of Joe’s offal menu is lamb’s tongue, served crispy with salsa verde and watercress. Abrahanowicz remembers a time in Australia when you could pick up tongue “for nothing”, but he says the price is rightly comparable to Wagyu now. “You only get one out of every animal, and it should be one of the most prized pieces.” 

The increase in value also reflects the fact that organs require extensive work to clean and prepare. Likewise, it’s much easier to buy a vacuum-packed 200-gram tenderloin than break down a whole pig each week. “It’s a skill that people are losing,” says Abrahanowicz, who has instated a “parts & labour” section dedicated to whole lamb and pig on the menu at Joe’s precisely to train chefs in this craft. 

Abrahanowicz’s dedication to tradition explains why he perseveres with offal: recently he prepared stuffed pig’s trotters at Joe’s Tavern for a customer who last savoured the dish at another Sydney restaurant some 20 years ago. “I haven’t done it in 25 years,” he says. The customer was reportedly “stoked”.  

But the dish debuted much earlier, in 1977 at Pierre Koffman’s legendary London restaurant La Tante Claire. The dish has since become so famous that Koffmann believes pig’s feet will be a fixture on his tombstone. 

“Koffmann’s trotters are one of those dishes that carry a kind of mythology: they’re a benchmark of classical French cookery and represent a time when technique, patience and nose-to-tail respect were inseparable from fine dining,” says James Horsfall of Brisbane’s Milquetoast.

Milquetoast served its own version of the dish (the recipient of the aforementioned “best dish ever” call) for its first birthday this year. But since opening in 2024, the bar has served everything from tandoori offal kebabs to duck neck sausage and pâté.

Horsfall admits some guests need a bit of context or encouragement to get there, but most love these dishes after taking a chance. “Using lesser-valued cuts challenges creativity; it forces you to think differently about flavour, texture and presentation,” he says. 

“There’s a real tension between what chefs want to create and what guests are comfortable eating. But that tension is fertile ground. It’s where new dishes, ideas and techniques emerge.”