London has The River Café. Sydney has Sean’s.
Sunday lunch of Sean’s roast chicken and barramundi, with ingredients sourced equally from the bush and the beach and eaten on Bondi to the sound of crashing waves, is a defining Sydney experience. In this quirky, triangular-shaped dining room—where you might go for a celebration, or just because—at one table a wet-haired young surfer wearing flip-flops might be on one side, while on the other, one of a half-dozen of Australia’s most globally famous actresses might be dining cheek-by-jowl with zero fuss made. Eating here is egalitarian and without any thought about it. These are the qualities that define Sean’s, which has become a symbol for what Australian hospitality is all about.
Owners Sean Moran and Michael “Manoo” Robertson have been partners in business and life for more than 30 years. “We met working in a pub restaurant, shook hands over a kitchen counter, and that was it,” as they tell it. Shortly after that handshake, they moved together to Bondi Beach, where on their way home one night they spotted a boarded-up storage room filled with junk at the foot of a block of unrenovated art deco flats. Somehow, within it, the two saw a charming place with a postcard view of the ocean, which they thought would make the ideal restaurant of their own. “I had a feeling that it was going to be special, despite me, no matter what. It was a salty jewel,” Sean says. They borrowed $30k from family and friends, scraped away paint, installed a grease trap and opened Sean’s Panaroma. (The ‘-roma’ was a nod to their love of Italy. Now, the place is just known as Sean’s.)
Sean’s opened in December 1993. I was there soon after, a 29-year-old out-of-town book editor lunching with left-leaning literary agents, luckily just the types to embrace a non-smoking, cash-only, BYO restaurant on the beach. There was a worm farm on the way to the bathroom, paper towels as napkins, and all the food was cooked on an old Australian gas Kooka stove. The walls are covered in eccentric artwork amassed over time, every piece with a story. On the ceiling is a whale in relief, made of hundreds of mussel and scallop shells. “Made in a therapy session,” Sean says. The space is not for everyone: a Melbourne critic once likened it to “a bomb shelter in Bosnia.” But I’ve always found it to be beachside chic, furnished with rescued treasures—a place to come home to.
Initially open for breakfast, lunch and dinner 7 days a week, Sean’s was built around comforting food, made with nearby ingredients, and everything—including the washing up—was done by hand. You will always be greeted by a farm offering on your table: a perfect persimmon, maybe, or a vase of unruly dahlias. You can dress how you will, straight off the beach in surf shorts or jeans, or in something glam. I know many who arrive from overseas, gather up friends or local business contacts, and head straight to Sean’s. It’s a restaurant so unpretentious and grounded in its location, you couldn’t mistake that you were anywhere else.
Until my first meal there, I had no imagining of deep-fried Clarence River school prawns served with aioli, one of the most intense food memories of my life. But while Sean’s is a sea-spray distance from one of the world’s most famous beaches, it is not actually a seafood restaurant. Sean and Manoo have been practicing a farm-to-plate-to-farm cycle since the ‘90s: they grow their own organic produce and citrus trees for the restaurant, as well as raise pigs, cattle and chickens (“chooks”) to make their most famous dish—a brined bird roasted then crisped on the grill and served with a homemade gravy that’s been thickened with olive oil and flavored with apple cider vinegar. The menu includes a farm plate with daily offerings from the owner’s garden, and the pair carts compost from the restaurant back to their farm at Bilpin in the Blue Mountains, 90 minutes away. “There’s nothing faddish here,” says Sean, who favors nostalgic dishes, like a favorite dessert of ice cream made with steamed fruit jelly. Still, Australian chef Kylie Kwong described him to me as a “cook’s cook,” and one with “the best roast chicken in Sydney—totally and utterly beyond.”
Always something of a creative director and more than just a chef, Sean likes to say he’s part provider, part maintenance man, part psychologist, part nurturer, part menu designer, part florist, and part whatever. During Covid time, the restaurant was closed for months, then the dining room while the kitchen offered takeaway, and gradually the owners have staggered guests and sittings to keep dining at a distance. While the doors to the restaurant were totally closed, Sean had painted the words FARM LOVE on the front entrance, and now he can’t bring himself to scrape them off.
“I sometimes think, ‘when will it end, how will it end, what’s going to happen?’,” Sean told me. “At the end of the day it’s about the staff being involved and harnessing what the ethics of the place are. I can see Sean’s going and going, and hopefully I’ll pass the baton to someone who will remain connected to our groundwork.”
