The best restaurants in Enmore

It’s easy to boil sustainable practices in restaurants down to scrapping single-use plastics and pounding pesto from leftover carrot tops – and those are important things. But what about the social, human element? What about creating an inclusive, empowering workplace that promotes personal and professional development and also contributes to the community at large? These are big, often overlooked questions, but they’re questions that schoolmates Peter Jones-Best and Shaun Christie-David are tackling headfirst at Colombo Social, the contemporary Sri Lankan diner they opened on Enmore Road at the end of 2019.

If you’re after tasty share plates, great wine and a vibe, head to Spanish-style Bar Louise, housed in the heritage-listed pink and purple former Stanbuli site. It’s by the Porteño Group (also Bastardo, Humble, Wyno x Bodega) so when we say tasty food, we mean it.

Above the dark and moody Queens Hotel is a high-end Cantonese restaurant by Merivale. The sunny and beautiful dining room is punctuated by tropical plants and ornate features, and it’s one of our favourite places to sit and spend a few hours eating with friends. Speaking of food, you can get delicate dumplings, succulent fish with soy, ginger and shallots, salt and pepper calamari and Peking duck. And yes, deep-fried ice cream with butterscotch sauce.

Enmore has its own New York-style slice shop, firing up 22 and 12-inch pies, with dough and cooking techniques taken straight from the Big Apple. These guys are proving the dough for 24-hours to improve the flavour and cooking down a rich tomato sauce to top every pizza. They also allow the oversized pizzas to cool before heating slices on a stone-bottomed oven for a crisper base.

Found a stroll from the Enmore Theatre, this corner pub is now run by the Odd Culture Group (also Odd Culture Newtown, the Old Fitz, Spon). Excellent live music is the focus here, as are good food and drinks. If you’re after a casual pub feed, the Duke serves up crowd-favourites including burgers, pizzas, steak and popcorn chicken.

One of Sydney's only Nigerian restaurants is in Enmore, which is great news for anyone in the Inner West craving some jollof rice and slow-cooked goat.

Egyptian street food pulls crowds to this corner spot where the pita pockets come stuffed with a heady garlic chicken, the fries are dusted in paprika and the beers in the fridge are local and crafty.

At Emma’s Snack Bar you'll want a serve of the smoky, feather-light babaganoush, but the spicy humous dressed with warm chilli oil and flecked with fried garlic is a worthy challenger for top dip. 

This is one of Sydney's best curry joints. Fast, fun and incredibly cheap, FFF gets an AAA for value but don't come for the décor or flattering lighting - come for the spicy, vermillion red butter chicken.

This neighbourhood bistro is the place for something a little more upmarket on Enmore Road. It's offering street Italian flavours with Indie sensibilities. 

Vegetables are delicious in their own right, and at Little Turtle, an all-veg Thai restaurant on Stanmore Road, they are banking on the fact that it’s not chicken that makes a tangle of hokkien noodles delicious.

They do coffee in the mornings to get you started and then delicious iced sweets until late, making it the perfect destination for an after dinner stroll on a balmy evening. Or it was, until a Enmore's favourite gelateria won a world gelato award and now the queues extend around the block every evening. Even Mondays. Even when it is raining. The time-saving move is to pop in early and get a tub takeaway.