Chef Dan Pepperell and his dream have brought a new wave of French dining to Potts Point. On the menu you'll find boudin noir (blood sausage) spring rolls, escargot pasta and steak frites. Plus, there's a drinks list by the Swillhouse Group's former sommelier.

Rosa Cienfuegos makes some of Sydney's best Mexican food. At this colourful and casual all-day Mexican eatery and deli, she's serving home-style dishes: huevos divorciados, tacos, garnachas and more. Plus, there are hard-to-find Mexican pantry goods to buy.

At this French bistro above P&V’s Paddington bottle shop, a 60-kilogram Berkshire pig gets delivered each fortnight. Every part of the beast is used, from the head (which becomes terrine) to the belly (bacon sangers for staff meals).

A’Mare is impressive. Owner Alessandro Pavoni wanted to emulate the theatre of a Michelin-starred meal, without the European stiffness – there's a roving gelato cart, pesto pounded tableside and a view over water so pretty that, if you squint, you might be fooled into thinking you're in Italy.

Keita Abe brings Japanese like you've never seen to Surry Hills with his tempura restaurant. Sit around the centrepiece wraparound counter and order from a constantly-shifting menu.

A canteen-style lunch-only restaurant by celebrity chef Kylie Kwong. Named after her late son, Lucky serves Kwong's signature Australian-Cantonese food – including her famous savoury pancakes.

This dazzling fine diner – from the duo behind legendary CBD restaurant The Bridge Room – was worth the wait. Each kitchen of the four kitchens here harness a different element: steam, fire, smoke and ice. From the seafood kitchen, you'll find piles of caviar and roe; and raw kingfish with lychee and grilled ginger. From the woodfire grill? There's swordfish and a 270-day-aged one-kilogram Black Market T-bone.

An ambitious, opulent multi-part Italian restaurant and bar inside Australia's first bank – with an executive chef who ran a Michelin-starred Italian restaurant. Take a seat in the main dining room, crudo bar or chef's table. There's Venetian-style bite-size snacks, 30 varieties of raw seafood and a three-metre-high wine fridge.

The successor to Chippendale's Freda's channels the spirit of the original late-night haunt into a buzzing sit-down bar and diner in the heart of Sydney's nightlife district.

This tiny pizzeria, run by two ex-Bella Brutta chefs, makes just 150 pizzas a day. So order your fermented-garlic honey, 'nduja or pepperoni pizza early – they sell out fast.

This buzzing eatery – with courtyards for balmy evening dining and an intimate dining room – encourages lingering. It evokes Tel Aviv’s cosmopolitan dining scene. Like Tel Aviv itself, chef Ben Sears’s food reflects the diaspora of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) and Sephardic (Iberian, Mediterranean and Levantine) Jewish staples. Think pickles with meze and flatbread, roasted cauliflower dressed with liberal amounts of grated haloumi and punchy za’atar, and lamb tagine.

Jimmy’s Falafel's colourful room features booths, frosted-glass sconces and tourism posters of cosmopolitan 1960s Beirut. As the name suggests, there’s falafel, which is stuffed in pita (among other things) and served alongside meze plates including eggplant salad, hummus and silverbeet. At night, there’s also meat cooked on the charcoal grill, and a wonderful smoky scent permeates the air. As at Henrietta, eating with your hands is encouraged and toum (garlic sauce) is liberally applied.

Woolloomooloo’s great-grandfather of a pub has an ex-Momofuku Seibo Chef in the kitchen and a celebrated indie theatre downstairs. The 150-year-old bolthole has outlasted many of its operators, but this latest incarnation – from the Odd Culture (The Oxford Tavern, The Duke Of Enmore) team – might be the best one yet.

Thanks to travel bans, it looks like we’ll be confined to Aussie shores for a long while yet. So a visit to Pepito’s is the next-best thing to a trip to Peru. Based on the “tabernas” (diners where you can eat home-style cooking, drink and hang out) owner José Alkon frequents when he’s in his Peruvian homeland, Pepito’s is serving Latin American cuisine and booze you’d be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in the city, while Peruvian punk rock is pumped from the speakers. Expect dishes such as leche de tigre especial – local seafood marinated in lime juice, garlic, chilli and ginger, and topped with deep-fried calamari.

Federico Zanellato and Karl Firla are two of Sydney’s most exciting chefs. On his resume the genre-bending Zanellato lists Copenhagen’s Noma, Melbourne’s Attica and Sydney’s Ormeggio at the Spit, and Firla was behind hard-to-get-into Newtown fine diner Oscillate Wildly, which sadly closed last year. Now they have opened an elegant Italian eatery in the city’s Angel Place precinct with slick service, white tablecloths and everything made in-house (pastry, bread, pasta, pickles – the lot). The menu swings from lobster ragu with truffles to veal saltimbocca and borlotti bean soup.

A brilliant partnership between Ho Jiak and Mr Wong's former head chef, Loong Oon. The menu pays tribute to Oon's grandmother with soy-braised pork belly, a deceptively simple king-prawn black-pepper curry, and a nostalgic soup of hand-pounded fish balls in a delicate clear broth.