Sydney Cheap Eats That Prove Paying More Isn’t Eating Better

• Sydney’s restaurant scene has become theatre, fuelled by social media clout and restaurant groups like Merivale and Neil Perry’s empire.
• Cheap eats like $13 dumplings or $99 “bodega sushi” feasts often deliver more satisfaction than $220 roasts or $75 pastas.
• The hype machine profits on overpricing while diners forget that food should be about flavour, not performance.

Sydney has a problem: we’ve turned dining out into theatre. Nobu arrives and suddenly black cod is a luxury rite of passage. Totti’s bakes flatbread and the city treats it like haute cuisine. Neil Perry builds another shrine to wagyu and wagyu pricing, while Justin Hemmes’ Merivale empire churns out venues that feel more like fashion shows than restaurants.

And it’s not just Sydney making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Melbourne’s groups aren’t exclusively selling food anymore, they’re selling a piece of the lifestyle, bouyed by food influencers and transient trends.

Once upon a time, restaurants were about flavour. Now they’re props for Instagram’s biggest w*nkers. A burrata on a terrazzo table photographed in the right light carries more cultural cachet than a perfectly cooked roast chicken in a pub.

Social media hasn’t just made it cool to be at expensive restaurants, it’s made it compulsory for anyone who wants to look like they’re in the right orbit. Rarely will you not see people taking photos of their overpriced food for the purposes of clout chasing on Instagram. Myself included, to be perfectly honest.

That thought stuck with me last week after two very different meals. At Rocker in Bondi, my partner and I ordered what should have been the cosiest of traditions: a Sunday roast. Add two glasses of wine each and the bill crept up to $220 for two. Two hundred and twenty dollars. For roast freaking beef.

A few nights earlier, we’d eaten at Myoko, a Bondi Japanese restaurant that looks like every other “bodega sushi” joint, a phrase immortalised in Succession as shorthand for cheap, possibly dodgy Japanese. Except Myoki was brilliant. Fresh fish, humble presentation, no theatrics. The bill? $99.

And then there was The Shop in Bondi, where two glasses of wine, meatballs and haloumi gave us more post City2Surf satisfaction than a bottle of anything triple-marked-up in a dining room ever could.

And that’s the kicker. When the hype machine tells you a $75 pasta at Totti’s is “essential Sydney dining,” you start to believe it. But then you wander down to your local and order a plate of dumplings, and the whole charade falls apart.

Take DMARGE’s own local, Pure Dumplings. Thirteen bucks for a plate of boiled and pan-fried dumplings. No bells, no whistles, just doughy little pockets of comfort.

I can guarantee the dopamine these bad boys give me after a sh*t day at work far outweighs any lobster pasta that costs six times more. One fills your stomach and your soul. The other fills your feed.

Restaurant groups know this game better than anyone. They’ve mastered the art of selling atmosphere and exclusivity.

You’re not paying for a meal, you’re buying into a scene. And Instagram, the great amplifier of everything vacuous, has turned those meals into currency.

Being seen at Totti’s, Mr Wong or Nobu isn’t about food, anymore; it’s about status. You post the pasta, the champagne glass, the marble backdrop. You get the dopamine hit, the likes, the perception that you belong. And a big old cheque for your troubles.

And here’s where the media steps in. All that hype is great for publishers like Broadsheet, whose livelihood depends on covering the cool and the new rather than the cheap and the nasty.

They need the shiny openings, the buzzy collaborations, the $38 cocktails with hand-carved ice balls. A bánh mì shop in Cabramatta doesn’t drive traffic; a $200 sirloin in Paddington does. And so the cycle feeds itself: the groups build, Instagram validates, and the media anoints.

But here’s the truth: paying more doesn’t mean eating better. You’re not calculating flavour, you’re calculating cost per bite.

Cheap eats, on the other hand, let you walk away with your expectations exceeded, not your wallet emptied. They don’t need sommeliers in waistcoats or PR campaigns in your feed. They just need to taste good.

Sydney will keep filling its temples of hype, and plenty of people will keep lining up to perform in them. But the meals that stay with you, the ones that feel like a win, will always come from places like Myoko, Pure Dumplings, and The Shop.

Because food is supposed to be about flavour and satisfaction, not feeding the machine that tells you $75 pasta equates to culture.