The esteemed Bentley duo, sommelier Nick Hildebrandt and chef Brent Savage, keeps busy with a stable of restaurants. Last month they opened grill restaurant Eleven Barrack in Martin Place; and in the back-end of 2024, they gave wine bar Monopole a fully French revamp and sun-setted Barangaroo seafood stop Cirrus. It’s BAU for King Clarence and Bentley. While these dining rooms are all polished in that signature Bentley way, their similarities end with their CBD postcode. So farewelling Potts Point’s Yellow makes sense for the city-slickers.

Longtime head chef Sander Nooij and his friend (and now business partner) Mark Hanover (Canva’s head chef) have taken the reins. “When you get an opportunity to pass on a restaurant like Yellow to a much-loved staff member, you don’t pass it up,” Savage said in a statement. “Sander has been an integral part of Yellow’s success … We’ve had a big couple of months launching Eleven Barrack, and we’re looking forward to focusing on Sydney’s CBD.”

Yellow is Sydney’s leading vegan fine diner. It’s known for its six-course set menu and sunshine-hued dining room. The terrace has a storied background: first a gallery, then a 1970s artists’ residence for now-iconic Aussie creatives like Brett Whitely and George Gittoes.

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“The menu has really been mine for the last few years, you know?” the Dutch-born Nooij tells Broadsheet. “To really change [anything] would be changing my own thing, which would be a bit strange. We are going to look into refining it and making it better and better and better – but that should be the intention of any restaurant.”

Local producers will continue to be a big part of the MO, and there’ll be a bigger push towards true sustainability.

“It’s very interesting to work this way. You have to find flavours in places that you normally don’t look for them. And you have to think about technique – especially in pastry, it’s quite difficult not to use dairy and eggs.”

The idea that this food is for everyone – not just vegans – remains the same as it was when Yellow became plant-based in 2016. “We want to be clear that we’re not ethical vegetarians, we’re just here to make vegetables delicious and to treat them as equal, that’s all,” Savage told Broadsheet at the time.

But the new owners want to change the label.

“We think there are some assumptions with the words ‘vegan’ and ‘plant-based’. In Holland, on the islands where I grew up, there’s a restaurant, [Op Oost] that’s fighting its way to a Michelin star … they use the term ‘botanical gastronomy’. And there’s another [two-star] restaurant that’s completely plant-based in Holland, called De Nieuwe Winkel – or The New Shop – and they also use that term. I thought that might be a nicer place to land. It is just a way to differentiate the connotations of specific ways of eating. We are trying to create a really nice dining experience where you only eat plant food. We are not trying to teach you anything.

“It’s a really interesting thing. I think what [people] think of as vegan food is fried cauliflower and slightly bland curry. Or fake meat. And that’s not what we do at all.”

@yellowsydney
@sander_nooij
@markhanover85