Beaches and cream

P.A. Greenwood

Sydney is an opium den for lifestyle junkies, a hotbed of food-loving, sunseeking sport enthusiasts. I realised this the first time I went to Bondi Beach. Unless you’re armed with a soya latte, yoga mat, designer bikini or designer in a bikini, you won’t make it past the BMWfilled car-park.

I had none of these when I moved to Sydney last year. I moved to get a break from London, which is cool and great for old buildings but also grey, expensive and generally dirty. Living in London isn’t easy. Living in Sydney is. It’s among the sunniest, cleanest and best-looking cities in the world. And full of Brits like me. They’re everywhere, overcaffeinated and sunburnt. Sod congestion-charging and the M4 at rush hour — they want the smell of baristamade coffee in the morning and warm melanoma-spawning sun on their skin.

I decided to give myself a year out of the rat-race to live in corpulent comfort. When I told British friends I was going to Sydney, they reacted as though I had opted out of real life to exile myself in Toytown. Or as one put it, ‘running away to a cultural backwater with a whole lot of convicts’.

Sitting outside a restaurant at Bronte Beach on my second day in exile, still wet from the sea, drinking a delicious Chardonnay and eating salt-and-chilli squid looking out over the waves, I could have wept for joy over life in the backwater. Sydney may be a cultural infant compared with London, Paris and Rome, but so what? It’s got better food — yes, really — and beaches. If this all sounds terribly superficial, it is — and unashamedly so.

Arriving from an English winter, you feel like a consumptive chimney sweep. Sydney is healthy, toned and well-groomed, and so is just about everyone in it. We are talking well-dressed beach culture.

The most popular beach with pretty young things in vintage swimwear is North Bondi. On summer weekends, it becomes irritatingly crowded with trendies, so I moved along to Tamarama. Known locally as ‘Glamarama’, it’s a similar, smaller place to be seen, which I absolutely didn’t want to be. So, after battling in flipflops along a breathtaking cliff walk joining the beaches, I laid my towel to rest at Bronte. It’s less pretentious, with a reliable mixture of glamour, nice restaurants and family BBQs.

With the help of a car, an even better discovery was the harbour beaches. Parsley Bay, Camp Cove and Nielsen’s Park are secluded, stupidly beautiful and good for having a proper swim in less treacherous waters. They also have shark nets, which I found improve the restorative quality of your swim immeasurably.

If, quite sensibly, you’re not a fan of tumbling surf, there is a clutch of ocean-water pools less easy to drown in. Icebergs at Bondi is the most famous, but Wylie’s Baths at Coogee is just as good-looking and more family-friendly. Andrew (Boy) Charlton Pool, nestled discreetly in the central Botanical Gardens, is the harbour choice for urban swimmers in the know. Expect Speedos and Louis Vuitton towel bags and go with a word of warning leave the fast lane to the body-hair-free locals.

Since I am not a big one for exerting myself in the name of physical health, I was relieved to discover that not all Sydney’s natural beauty means exercise. The city’s views and climate breed cafés. The place is seriously serious about coffee made by seriously trained baristas. They even have Latte Art competitions.

The standard flat white (like a latte but stronger and less frothy) doesn’t even exist in the UK except at one Soho café run by Australians called Flat White. Most people in Sydney have a favourite local barista they are devoted to. I whored about a bit and found them all to be pretty wonderful.

Alarmingly, this coffee-loving outdoorsy life has an affection for early mornings. Like most Londoners in their twenties, I was bred to crawl under cover of darkness from bed to work to pub and back to bed. In Sydney people wake up at six, go for a swim and meet for an early breakfast. I accepted the breakfast and slept through the rest.

Soon, my standard greasy-spoon hangover cure was replaced by avocado and lime on toasted sourdough, granola, honey, yogurt and fruit or toasted banana bread. What’s staggering is that you are offered this menu pretty much anywhere, and cheaply — no more than $12 (£5).

Of course, there are hotspots whose prices hover around the $25 (£10) mark. Bill Granger’s restaurant in Darlinghurst is a breakfast institution, while the new favourite, raved about for its fluoro-yellow eggs, is the Book Kitchen in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills. For me, heaven on a breakfast plate lay at Le Petit Crème in King’s Cross, with its perfect poached oeufs, crispy bacon and a trademark bowl of coffee. But that could have been my Euro-nostalgia.

It’s true that Sydney has a silver spoon lodged in its gourmet mouth. There are the old favourites, of course — Vegemite, pavlovas and a coconut-and-chocolatesmothered sponge-cake miracle called the Lamington — but the city has fantastic natural produce and an immigrant population (Italians, Greeks, Vietnamese and Cantonese) who make the most of it.

Bondi Beach is flanked by two food institutions. The Hollywood-friendly Icebergs, named after the aforementioned pool it overlooks, is at one end and the more cosy and affordable North Bondi Italian is at the other. I once saw the daughter of a former Australian premier pin the actor Owen Wilson against a wall of the Icebergs bar with her hips and it rather put me off the place, but that kind of carry-on among a clientele that includes Paris Hilton and Heath Ledger, only seems to boost its appeal.

In between is Sean’s Panaroma, which has great, fresh food and a beautiful Bondi view. Dinner costs about $180 (£70) for two without wine, which isn’t cheap but is still ten times more delicious than the paparazzi-stalked, overpriced UK equivalents. Billy Kwong, Long Grain and Tetsuya are among the best Asian-influenced menus about.

It’s just very, very easy to eat out every night and be thrilled in Sydney, which is fine if you’re Jamie Packer. Sadly, the pound is strong but it’s not Samson. Proper foodies, not lazy me, head to the fresh-food markets and cheaper specialist restaurants in the ’burbs. In brief, Cabramatta is the place to head for Asian, Marrickville for Greek, and Leichhardt, Newtown or Haberfield for Italian.

I would follow an urge for seafood to Greg Doyle’s famous Pier Restaurant in Rose Bay, but the Sydney Fish Market in Blackwattle Bay (the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere) makes a very easy lunch out of the freshest of fresh prawns and crab.

I was spoilt by Sydney. My indulged appetite for delicious food was coupled with cheap weekly manicures, going to the cinema in a park with a view of the harbour and driving for an hour to extraordinary weekends away in Palm Beach and the Blue Mountains.

I arrived back at Heathrow healthy, with neat nails and a desperate need for a flat white. I had whinged about missing London’s glut of high-street shops, unparalleled galleries and generally cool edge, but by the time I got home all my edges had been rubbed off by Bondi sand.

What do you mean I have to pay £50 for an average meal? Why is it always raining? Pay £8 to drive into town — are you mad? Sydney is a dangerous place for Brits, Londoners especially. My recommendation is not to go unless you are damn sure you’ll hate every superficial moment of it.