NICK'S
Seafood Restaurant
COCKLE BAY, SYDNEY

My casual weekend lunch with a couple of close friends at Nick’s at Darling Harbour was saved in the nick of time.

In a Monty Python episode it did not start well. In the aquatic labyrinth of Darling Harbour my friends couldn’t find it – and had to be guided in by mobile phone. I felt like a flight controller at Sydney Airport.

I had arrived early and that caused a problem. My Greek manager, Marina Paul, had insisted we eat there. She/ I were keen on a Greek meal for a Sydney Saturday lunch and Nick’s was supposedly the place.

Without looking at the menu I ordered some pita bread and tarama salata. It arrived. It was the strangest pita and salmon roe I had ever seen. The bread for starters was circles of commercial lavoche (like the they serve in First Class on Qantas) and the usually pink tarama was white.

I questioned it. They said that’s the way we serve it.

After I flagged guests, Ms Paul and ex-wife Jacki Weaver, through flight control, we attacked the menu.

And it dawned on me that Nick’s wasn’t a Greek restaurant at all. A good menu but not a Greek menu. It turned out to be Nick’s seafood restaurant.

We were there. We stayed. And I suggested Nick’s seafood platter for two for $110. Sounded good. Fresh cooked lobster, steamed mussels, fried calamari, King prawns, catch of the day fish, Blue Swimmer Crabs, some freshly shucked oysters and avocado.

They are always big serves and I am not a big eater. I figured a platter for two would feed the three of us. The women at the table decided that $110 was too expensive.

So I ordered some char grilled King prawns with rocket salad and some sweet chilli sauce. Traditional but sweet and a bit spicy.

My female guests, who had baulked at $110 for the platter, decided to have what somebody at the next table was attractively having: a clean and healthy lobster salad. It was lovingly recommended by the waitress. Later I understood why.

It was stylish, clean, beautiful. Just like the view out over a vibrant Darling Harbour which has, in recent years, come out of a troubled chrysalis to finally become a butterfly.

Nick’s is huge. It has a huge seafood menu. It works. It is Sydney. In more ways than one.

When the bill came I checked the two lobster salads for the duo who didn’t want the $110 panoply of lobster and mussels and calamari and prawns etc. Their two lobster salads cost $58 each. Do the sums.

At Darling Harbour methinks the darlings left me at the wrong end of the harbour.