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On a recent visit Down Under, I appointed myself umpire and supreme arbiter in the culinary duel between Australia's two great cities. There were no rules, except to eat and drink as much good food and wine as I could without endangering my health. I don't want to create any false suspense, so I will tell you at the outset that as far as food and cooking goes, it was a tie: Virtually everything I ate was good, much of it was excellent, and there were a few unforgettable dishes. However, I will give Melbourne a slight edge in service. At even some of the best restaurants in Sydney, the service can be slow and amateurish. Some of this is cultural, of course: Australians view the restaurant experience as the evening's entertainment, not something to be fitted in around the theater or a movie. And with the choices available to them, it easy to see why: For delicious foodstuffs and creative cookery, with a wide choice of complex, satisfying wines to accompany them, there's no better place on earth right now than Australia.

My Australian foodie friends carefully vetted my choice of restaurants, so I went to some of the best the continent has to offer. But not even the fanciest meal gave me more satisfaction than the half-dozen freshly shucked oysters I ate at a stand-up kiosk on an afternoon jaunt to Manly Beach, Sydney. A cool breeze was blowing, the antipodean springtime sun glinted warmly off the waves and the oysters were cold and briny, served just as I wanted them to be served, with a lemon wedge, black pepper and Tabasco sauce.

My first dinner in Melbourne was at Circa, in the newly renovated boutique hotel the Prince, in St. Kilda, a suburban seaside resort (imagine chic Coney Island, if you can). It was a spectacular meal: I started with ravioli stuffed with foie gras -- I always order foie gras if it's on the menu, it's one of my little rules -- and had for my main course a roast barramundi, a rich, white fish from local waters, which was garnished with seared scallops. It was all beautifully cooked, bright and alive with fresh flavor, and served expertly but without a big fuss. Yet it's my breakfast there the next morning that I remember most vividly: This was just scrambled eggs, but they were the best scrambled eggs I have ever tasted, rich and satiny smooth and steaming hot.

In recent years, both Sydney and Melbourne have become home to large immigrant populations, so they abound with good neighborhood Vietnamese and Turkish joints. Eighty-six national cuisines are available in Australia -- at least that's what someone told me, but I'm not sure I could even name 86 countries -- and none of them is more enticing than what is officially known as modern Australian, though it's usually called Mod Oz. It's like American cuisine, in that there's really no such thing, not in the way that French or Chinese or Indian cookery is an integral part of the national identity and governed by ancient traditions. Yet -- again, as with American cuisine -- it is precisely this lack of tradition that permits Australian chefs to be so creative.

They're certainly serious about their food. In Melbourne, one of the newspapers publishes a glossy, full-color, 268-page book called the "Good Food Guide," devoted to the city's restaurants -- rather like Zagat's, except written by restaurant critics, and not based on the opinions of people with nothing better to do in their leisure time than answer questionnaires. To give you an idea of just how serious they are about food in Australia, here's what the "Good Food Guide" says about Circa: "Truly great restaurants, everywhere, transport. Like good cinema or literature, they take us out of ourselves to another, more pleasurable place, and leave a lingering glow of contentment. Circa is indisputably such a place."

Nobody loves good food more than I do, but I have to say, the person who wrote that got carried away. Shopping for baking apples takes a connoisseur's eye, and making a flaky pie dough is a skill that not everyone can master. But there has never been an apple pie that could take the place of "Leaves of Grass" or "A Touch of Evil." I'm sorry, but food really isn't art: Once you've eaten it, it's gone forever. Remember "Ars longa, vita brevis"? Food is definitely vita.

Still, the anonymous reviewer did get one word right: pleasurable. Eating a truly great meal closely resembles another activity even more popular than reading or going to the movies, which gives intense pleasure and leaves you with a lingering glow of contentment. And if there's any place where food gives sex a run for its money, it's Oz. Here is my completely scientific and carefully researched list of favorite restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne, with the proviso that another list with a completely different set of names might be just as good.

Next page | Melbourne's fab four