Hot List Update: Bessie’s – the New Restaurant from the Bar Copains Trio – Is Added

This week’s Hot List activity

• Added: Bessie’s
• Most trending restaurant: Island Radio (runner-up: Canvas)
• Most trending bar: Letra House (runner-up: The Old Fitzroy)
• Most trending cafe: Superfreak (runner-up: Flour and Stone)

Bar Copains gets some new friends up the road

I timed it. It takes one minute and 26 seconds to walk from Bar Copains to Bessie’s and Alma’s (unless you have very lengthy legs). Which means that anyone who’s part of the Surry Hills wine bar’s devoted fanbase – and there’s a lot of them – will have an easy time checking out the latest spot from friends and business partners Morgan McGlone and Nathan and Sali Sasi.

They’ll also have a much easier time finding a seat. A major part of Copains’ charm is its small footprint, intimate feel and teeny seat count. But that also makes getting a table there, particularly on a lovely day, quite challenging. That shouldn’t be an issue at Bessie’s and Alma’s, the hospo trio’s vast new two-in-one restaurant and cocktail bar, 130 metres up the road. It opens tomorrow, and last night, for the soft opening, we were there for the first look. This week, we’re adding Bessie’s to The Hot List. We know – and hope – that you’ll go to both, but we had to pick one.

So what’s the go at Bessie’s? Successive generations of chefs will remember it as the former home of kitchen supplies retailer Chef’s Warehouse. Now the old supplier for Sydney’s best restaurants is home to one of Sydney’s best new restaurants.

It’s all about the small plates here, and the menu has a distinctly Spanish undercurrent. That influence shows up everywhere from the gazpacho with stracciatella to the chorizo with salsa mojo verde. Chimichurri pools over steak. Shaved iberico cheese hides inside side salads. You’ll find grilled romano beans partying with ajo blanco. There’s a lamb shoulder empanada in the mix too. Between Bessie’s and Gilda’s further down the road, Iberian things are happening on Albion Street.

The radical thing about Bar Copains when it opened was how un-radical it was. A nice but sparse dining room instead of a splashy multimillion-dollar one. An agnostic indifference to natural wine. A food menu that wasn’t too smart for its own good. Just a wine bar doing wine bar things well. And everyone lapped it up. There’s a similar dedication to the simple-but-not-easy ethos at Bessie’s and Alma’s.

There are exciting drinks and dishes for sure. But the main thing you should expect is immaculate execution, a reverence for classic cooking and flavours, and a place that doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel but instead wants to celebrate the things that made the wheel so great to begin with.

Haberfield gets another thing to smile about

Happyfield is one of our favourite Hot List cafes. And the home of Sydney’s favourite pancakes (sorry, Pancakes on the Rocks) just announced a spin-off last week. It’ll also be in Haberfield. Details are scant right now but Happy Shop, as it’ll be known, seems like it’ll be geared more towards the takeaway crowd. Here’s hoping the McLovin muffins make the jump over to the new spot.

Get ready for the Year of the Snake with Ho Jiak

Lunar New Year is two weeks away, and bookings around town are being snapped up. Celebrations kick off on January 29, with rolling events and festivities around town until February 16. Ho Jiak Haymarket is getting in on the festivities with its annual lion dance performance on February 2. It’ll also debut its Lunar New Year menu from January 17.