A hotel where people will actually want to eat at the restaurant: it’s about the best invention of 2014. Canberra’s Hotel Hotel turns away the soggy BLT, the chicken Caesar with baguette-sized chunks of insipid “croutons”, and the bar menu alone is enough to inspire a few nights booked into the hotel upstairs. Think of the room service!

Since his yabbie jaffle became the main reason to go to Canberra, chef Sean McConnell’s Monster has beckoned an onslaught of epicurean nomads from Sydney and Melbourne.

The room is a vast hotel lobby, but it’s one of the most unique, slick-and-warm-at-once boutique lodgings in the country. This bar (which does breakfast, too) serves the hotel’s guests and any punter off the street. Concrete, copper and shafts of light reign here, there are leather seats made for plonking and drinking. It’s a place to settle in with a plate for jamon and a Martini after a journey (either from the office or Sydney). McConnell has the same deft hand with Asian-tilted Australian as his brother Andrew, of Supernormal, Cumulus Inc, Cutler & Co Melbourne fame (another brother, Matt, is behind Bar Lourinha and Casa Ciuccio). But brother Sean calls this Australian. The bar snacks are a wow-worthy assortment that deserve their place on the menu; crunchy buttermilk fried quail with sriracha, Boxgum Grazing beef tartare with miso cured egg yolk, avocado, fresh horseradish and crisp black rice, and that winning yabbie jaffle.
Tel: 02 6287 6287

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