This $48 Lunch Set – From One of Sydney’s Top Restaurants – Is Worth Forking Out For

King Clarence is on The Hot List, the definitive guide to Sydney’s most essential food and drink experiences, updated weekly.

A great way to try out a restaurant – to see if it’s your thing, whether it might be worth splashing out for on a special night – is to speed date it. Find a high-value deal or special (there’s almost always one on offer), then book yourself in for a quick rendezvous.

If you’ve been meaning to try King Clarence, the perfect excuse to head on over has just landed. Because its new lunch set, which launched last month, is one of the best – and best-value – lunches in Sydney right now.

“I’ve wanted to do a lunch set for like a year now,” says Khanh Nguyen, King Clarence’s executive chef. “But with a dish like that, it’s so labour-intensive – there’s so many little components.”

The solution Nguyen eventually landed on was for each of the kitchen’s sections to tackle one lunch component. “And then it all meets on the pass and heads to the table.”

For $48 you’ll get a slab of Korean fried chicken in a puddle of buttermilk dashi; a very jazzed up tamago kake gohan (seasoned rice topped with egg yolk); an umami-packed cup of miso; and a sashimi platter thronged with bluefin tuna, Ora King salmon, hiramasa kingfish and scallop. If you feel like pushing the boat (even further) out, you can add some caviar, too.

And the whole King Clarence menu is still on offer, which means a couple of the restaurant’s signature fish finger baos can make a – probably unnecessary but always welcome – appearance on your order if you wish.

Nguyen drew inspiration for the sashimi portion from the elaborate platters he routinely whips up at home and broadcasts to his followers on Instagram. “When I post it, a lot of people are like, ‘I want to eat that’,” he says. “So it’s giving people what they’ve been asking for – a mini version of these extravagant platters.”

The fried chicken tastes, in the best possible way, like an extremely elevated version of the juicy kind you find throughout Japan and its convenience stores.

“I’ve actually been trying to perfect fried chicken since I started as a chef,” Nguyen says. “It’s one of those dishes that’s so hard to get right. But one of our chefs did it for staff meal the other week, and it was so awesome.”

That’s when Nguyen knew he’d found the anchor of his dream lunch set. It’s rounded out by a bowl of dashi rice with nori and bamboo shoots woven through it, and a miso soup that’s umami-augmented by parmesan rinds from sister venue Eleven Barrack.

There are only 14 serves of the lunch set available every day at King Clarence, so if you want to give it a try you’ll have to book. If you do, you won’t regret it. Forty-eight dollars for lunch may not be anyone’s idea of cheap, but it’s hard to think of a better quality-to-price lunch in Sydney right now. Especially in a world where standard pub parmies have crossed the $30 mark.

And it’s no limited-time-only situation either. You can expect it to stick around for a while – even though the components might change over time.

“It’s something that will be consistently evolving,” Nguyen says. “But we’re going to leave it as is for a bit, because a lot of people still need to try it.”

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