EAT > Clam Bar, Sydney (18/20)

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Sydney’s CBD has never been short of a steakhouse. Rockpool Bar & Grill, The Gidley, Bistecca, Kingsleys, Chophouse and now Grill Americano all compete for the same expense accounts, so a New York-style grill needs more than a good rib eye to stand out. Clam Bar has it. Dan Pepperell, Mikey Clift and Andy Tyson, the trio behind Pellegrino 2000, flew to Manhattan to study the great chophouses (the crab cakes, the white jackets, the Caesar salad, the martinis) and came home to open their own on the corner of Bridge and Young Streets, a short walk up from Circular Quay. The difference is that here the prawn cocktail and the creamed spinach actually taste good. It is warm, clever, a little irreverent, and three years on it is still one of the hardest tables in town to book.

AMBIENCE >

From the street it gives very little away: tinted glass and a pair of silver doors with CLAM BAR across them in big letters. The building does the rest. This is Booth House, built in 1937–38 for a family of wool brokers and one of the CBD’s rare Functionalist office buildings, with long bands of steel windows designed to flood the sample rooms with natural light. Look up as you go in. A stylised ram’s head is etched into the red granite lintel above the entrance, a small nod to the wool trade that paid for it all.

Inside, architect Mike Hanna has turned the old Bridge Room into a New York dining room of yore, but with a sense of humour. Herringbone timber floors, glossy wood veneer panelling and timber booths set the tone, lit by toffee-coloured Art Deco chandeliers and Murano glass sconces in the shape of clam shells. Potted palms soften the browns. The art is the fun part: an illuminated, under-the-sea painting by Archibald-nominated Laura Jones, works by Sulman-nominated Nadia Hernández, vintage posters for Ortiz anchovies and tomato sauce, and a life-size tin marlin from Mexico mounted on the wall. It is equal parts cosy and slick, a sort of after-hours gentlemen’s sitting room crossed with a 1970s pool hall.

The room is split between booths and tables, and the booths are the ones to ask for. It can get loud when it is full, which is most nights, so it suits a celebration better than a quiet conversation.

EAT >

Head chef Sam Galloway, who came across from the group’s Bistrot 916, opened the kitchen with Pepperell and Clift, and the menu reads like a love letter to mid-century Manhattan with a knowing Sydney accent. It runs from a raw bar, through entrées and seafood, to steaks cooked over charcoal in a Josper oven.

Start at the raw bar. Oysters Metropole is the dish everyone remembers: a half-dozen East Coast oysters served with hot lemongrass chipolatas. Eat a cold oyster, bite the hot sausage, repeat. Penny’s prawn cocktail brings tiger prawns with a proper cocktail sauce, and there is a daily crudo, caviar with tuna on Pomme Anna, and a chicken liver parfait on a toasted spelt crumpet. The anchovy toast with pickled peppers and green olives is the perfect thing to have with a martini.

The entrées are where the kitchen’s wit shows. A witlof Caesar with anchovy cream and Parmesan pangrattato, chopped raw beef with dill pickles and Mimolette, yellowfin tuna tartare with beef-fat potatoes, and grilled calamari with celery, white anchovy and chilli crisp. From the sea there is grilled scampi in garlic butter, a bone-in John Dory chop with tomato and scallop XO, and a whole market fish, grilled and finished Grenobloise. The lobster spaghetti, with rock lobster, tomato and shellfish bisque, has become the house signature, and when the namesake spaghetti with clams is on, it is a garlicky, buttery, chilli-flecked reminder that this team also runs one of Sydney’s best Italian restaurants.

Then the steaks. The standard cuts are a 250-gram flat iron, a 350-gram New York strip and a 600-gram rib eye, each with a choice of anchovy butter, béarnaise or sauce Diane. For a bigger night, the Reserve list climbs through a Stone Axe fullblood wagyu inside skirt, a Chauvel citrus-fed eye fillet and an 800-gram Chauvel rib eye, to a 60-day dry-aged Pardoo Takeda Ten scotch fillet at MBS 9+. And if you don’t want steak at all, the Clam Bar cheeseburger, 250 grams of grass-fed beef with American cheese, pickles and a sesame bun, has a strong claim to being the best burger in the city.

The sides are not an afterthought. Beef-fat potatoes, creamed spinach, a satin-smooth corn and Gruyère gratin, macaroni alla vodka and, for the indulgent, green beans with foie gras. Finish with a vanilla crème brûlée, or the chocolate royale, a twice-baked chocolate soufflé with rum butterscotch and banana gelato. For a group, two banquet menus take in the highlights.

DRINK >

Andy Tyson’s wine list is built to go with meat and seafood: iconic international producers alongside Australian classics, leaning French, with a Chablis selection that is one of the best in town and a good range by the glass. The cocktails are given more attention here than at the group’s other venues. The martini is the one to order. It is bone dry and made in the style of Dukes in London, Ian Fleming’s old local, with the gin stored so far below zero it pours almost like syrup, and plenty of people consider it the best in Sydney. Beyond the New York classics (the Manhattan, the Negroni) the list has a playful streak, with tiki-style drinks such as the Jungle Bird and a Blue Daiquiri that nod to the daggier cocktails of the 1980s.

CONCLUSION >

Clam Bar is a very good restaurant that wears its cleverness lightly. It takes everything that makes a New York steakhouse fun (the booths, the martinis, the theatre of the prawn cocktail and the whole fish) and then simply cooks it better. The room is handsome and full of character, the service has been praised from day one, and the raw bar, the pasta and the steaks are all reasons to return. It isn’t cheap. The Reserve steaks run well into three figures, and a 10% service charge applies to groups of six or more. It can also be loud, and bookings remain hard to come by. But you don’t have to go large: a seat with oysters Metropole, a cheeseburger and a frozen martini is one of the CBD’s great pleasures. Hatted in the Good Food Guide, Clam Bar is ideal for a business lunch, a celebration or a big night out with friends.

Dan Pepperell’s career began at the sink. He was washing dishes in Cronulla when he answered a job advertisement at Tetsuya’s by sending in a childhood photo of himself making sushi. It got him the job, and two years under head chef Martin Benn. He went on to cook at Marque, Attica, Lotus and Oscillate Wildly, then Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York, before returning to Sydney to lead the kitchens at 10 William St, Restaurant Hubert and Alberto’s Lounge. Andy Tyson is a sommelier who worked alongside him at Alberto’s Lounge, and Mikey Clift came from the Rockpool Dining Group.

The three joined forces during the pandemic and, against plenty of advice, opened Bistrot 916 in Potts Point in February 2021, in the old Lotus site where Pepperell had once cooked. Pellegrino 2000, a trattoria in a Surry Hills corner terrace, followed in early 2022, and became famous worldwide when Taylor Swift dined there in 2024.

Clam Bar opened on 3 May 2023, after a research trip that took in New York’s great steakhouses, from Peter Luger to Keens. Bistrot 916 closed in late 2024 to make way for a hotel development, the same year Neptune’s Grotto, a northern Italian restaurant, opened in the basement beneath Clam Bar. Grandfathers, devoted to Chinese cuisine, followed in the old Long Chim space at Angel Place.

The building has a story of its own. Booth House was designed by Brewster and Manderson and built by William Hughes & Co in 1937–38 for Frederick H. Booth & Sons, whose wool-broking business stretched around the world. It stands on land that was once part of the gardens of the First Government House. The original palette was unusually colourful: sandstone, red granite, salmon brickwork, green mullions and steel windows painted brown and pale green, with Queensland maple and copper glazing. Restaurants arrived in the basement and on the ground floor in the 1970s. Before Clam Bar, the corner was home to Opera Brasserie and, most famously, Ross Lusted’s The Bridge Room. Lusted, a former executive chef of Rockpool, had wanted the site for a decade, and from late 2011 until its final service on 27 April 2019, The Bridge Room was among the finest restaurants in Sydney.

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