Potts Point, Sydney: Inside the City's Art Deco Dining Quarter

Macleay Street runs dead straight for the better part of a kilometre, from the platforms at Kings Cross station down to where the land drops away toward the harbour at Elizabeth Bay, and it refuses to stay one thing for long. Walk it slowly and the character shifts block by block: a French bakery with steam fogging the window, a wine bar stocking 350 bottles, a 1930s apartment block with a curved glass-brick stairwell and wrought-iron balconies stacked six storeys high. This is what's left after Kings Cross's neon strip sobered up — the residential, food-obsessed half of the old red-light district, and arguably the most interesting place in Sydney to spend a week eating dinner. The neighbourhood reads, in practice, as two places stitched together: Macleay Street itself is the polished spine, its Art Deco and Moderne apartment blocks holding ground-floor bistros and providores behind their original wrought iron, while the streets and lanes that spill off it — Challis Avenue, Kellett Street, Orwell Street — carry the bars and smaller kitchens that make the whole area worth lingering in after dark.

What Potts Point is known for

Potts Point is Sydney's Art Deco quarter, and there's no serious rival for the title. Roughly a hundred apartment blocks from the 1930s and 40s, plus a scatter of 1960s Moderne towers, survive along Macleay Street and Springfield Avenue — more than anywhere else in the country. On Macleay Street itself, Franconia and Macleay Regis carry the style's signature moves: rounded corner balconies, glass brick, chrome-edged doorways built for a city that was, for one architectural moment, trying to look like Miami.

A short detour off Macleay Street onto Springfield Avenue turns up Carinthia and Carisbrooke, two more survivors from the same inter-war building boom, set on a quieter, leafier street a block back from the main run of restaurants. Together they explain why this neighbourhood suits food-first travellers chasing hatted restaurants and serious wine within a ten-minute walk of their pillow, and why it suits couples or solo travellers who'd rather have a walkable, characterful base than a resort strip. It suits them better than it suits families wanting something quiet and sanitised — parts of Kings Cross, a few streets over, still run late and loud — and it's no use at all to anyone who wants beach access on foot; the sand at Bondi or Coogee is a bus or a taxi away from here. Between hatted dinners and $8 house pours a few streets over, the neighbourhood stretches across budgets more than its polished façades first suggest — mid-range to upmarket is the honest description, not exclusively expensive.

Where to eat and drink

Macleay Street and the laneways off it — Challis Avenue, Llankelly Place, Kellett Street — hold one of the densest concentrations of good, small-scale restaurants in Sydney, and almost none of them need a special occasion to justify a booking. Start at the vegetable end: Yellow, on Macleay Street, runs a hatted six-course tasting menu built almost entirely around vegetables, a genuine destination kitchen rather than the token meat-free listing on somebody else's menu.

For years, the neighbourhood's most reliable queue has formed outside Fratelli Paradiso on Challis Avenue — no bookings taken, handmade pasta, wood-fired dishes, and a room that fills within minutes of the doors opening each evening.

Further along Macleay Street, Le Frérot, from the team behind Franca, runs as a French bakery by day — croissants, a spanner crab omelette worth the wait — before turning into a bistro once the evening service starts. Around the corner on Kellett Street, Ezra serves Eastern Mediterranean and Jewish cooking — pickles, meze, oysters — in a small room that fills early and rarely empties before closing. For something lower-key, Fei Jai on Challis Avenue does dumplings and noodles without any of the fuss the street's bigger names carry, and Room 10, tucked at the top of Llankelly Place, has been the neighbourhood's specialty coffee fixture since 2010 — the kind of café that locals set their mornings by rather than discover on holiday. None of this needs a reservation made weeks out — it's a neighbourhood built for wandering between Challis Avenue and Kellett Street until something smells right, then sitting down.

When it's time to trade coffee for wine, Dear Sainte Éloise on Orwell Street, from the Love, Tilly Devine team, pours from a 350-bottle list against a small-plates menu that changes daily.

Nightlife and bars

After dark, Potts Point splits cleanly in two. Polished small bars cluster around Macleay Street and the streets that run off it; a few blocks over, Kings Cross proper is still working through its rebuild after the lockout laws gutted the old entertainment strip. The theatrical end of the neighbourhood's nightlife is The Roosevelt on Orwell Street, a cocktail bar styled on 1950s New York, complete with tableside trolley service and an 800-bottle whisky collection that takes up most of one wall.

For something with a view, The Butler on Victoria Street stacks a multi-level rooftop terrace above the street, serving Mexico City-inspired share plates under the city skyline.

Kellett Street carries two more of the area's better small bars: Bar Lucia, a Spanish wine bar that leans hard on Australian women winemakers, pouring alongside tapas and jamón, and ArmsLength, a casual townhouse bar with a fig-tree terrace and $8 house drinks — proof this stretch of the city isn't reserved only for people on expense accounts. Between The Roosevelt's trolley service and ArmsLength's fig tree, the range on offer here runs from full theatre to no fuss at all within four streets of each other.

Things to do

The obvious first move, and still the best one, is to walk Macleay Street slowly from top to bottom, reading the Art Deco as you go — Franconia and Macleay Regis on the main street, then the short detour to Springfield Avenue for Carinthia and Carisbrooke — before the street runs out toward the harbour at Elizabeth Bay. Elizabeth Bay House waits at that end of it: a Greek Revival mansion built between 1835 and 1839 by the colonial architect John Verge, open Sunday and Monday, 10am to 4pm, with timed entry, and about as clear a picture as you'll get here of what this land looked like before the apartment boom rewrote it.

Double back through Fitzroy Gardens and the El Alamein Fountain announces itself before you've read a single sign for it — a 1961 dandelion-form memorial to the WWII desert campaign, and one of the most photographed landmarks in the neighbourhood, especially once it's lit at night.

Both landmarks sit an easy walk from each other and from Macleay Street itself, which is the point of doing Potts Point on foot rather than by taxi — nothing here is more than fifteen minutes from anything else.

Shopping

Shopping in Potts Point is small and specific rather than a strip of chains. Potts Point Bookshop, run out of the same stable as Macleay on Manning for more than two decades, is the pick of Macleay Street's independents — design books stacked alongside ceramics, candles and small-run fashion, the kind of shop you duck into for ten minutes and leave forty minutes later with something you didn't plan on buying.

It's not a shopping neighbourhood in the mall sense, and that's rather the appeal — everything on offer here fits in a tote bag, not a suitcase.

Where to stay in Potts Point

Potts Point's hotels are almost all small and boutique, set inside converted terraces rather than towers — a scale that suits a neighbourhood built on 1930s apartment blocks rather than glass. Spicers Potts Point occupies a trio of 1880s townhouses on Victoria Street, sage-painted with wrought-iron balconies, reworked into a 20-room stay that puts guests closest to the Orwell and Kellett Street bar cluster. Hotel Challis, spread across two restored Victorian townhouses near Macleay Street, offers harbour and bridge glimpses from its upper rooms and sits nearer the restaurant end of the neighbourhood. Between the two of them, and the smaller stays around them, the area covers most budgets that fall short of full CBD hotel prices without giving up much in the way of comfort or location.

Getting around

Kings Cross railway station, on the T4 Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra Line, sits at Potts Point's northern edge, which puts most of the neighbourhood within a five-to-ten-minute walk of a platform. It's about three stops and under ten minutes to Martin Place in the CBD, with an easy change there onto the wider rail network. From the airport, reckon on a fifteen-to-twenty-minute taxi or rideshare, or the Airport Link on the T8 line with one change along the way. On foot, Macleay Street and Challis Avenue stay well-lit and busy late into the evening; it's the Darlinghurst Road strip in Kings Cross proper, a few streets west, that still carries some late-night rowdiness and a handful of strip clubs left over from its red-light past.