Aqua Dining – waterfront views

Aqua dining is located on Milsons Point, next to Luna Park. Not the easiest place to find – but make your way towards the stairs leading down to Luna Park and you’ll find the entrance to the restaurant above the pool. The restaurant leads downstairs, but there is a lift if you need it.

The waterfront restaurant is long and has dual rows of tables, one against the wall with couch style seats, which is where we sat, and the other near the windows. Both have incredible unrivalled views of the harbour and it is really pleasant to simply sit and admire the beautiful location. You can see the ferries travelling by, as well as the stunning harbour bridge. It simply is a marvellous location.

The day we were there, it was freezing cold, and they had the heat pumped up (slightly too much), but it felt very comforting.

We had a party of 9 and they took us to our table, presented us with menus and shortly took a drink order. The service here is A class. They were extremely attentive, filling up glasses, removing plates quickly and presenting the food promptly and it was completely unobtrusive. We were extremely grateful for this, and they didn’t seem to mind us handing around presents and staying there for about 4 hours. We also note the venue suits all crowds. A family had a small child there, there were business workers and a large group like ours.

We went on a Sunday which is thoroughly recommended as they offer three courses for $75 (normally 2 courses for that price) and you can also BYO your own bottle of wine at $15 corkage which is a big saving for us as the diner.

We like fine dining and so does my father, but our other family members such as my sister and mother are quite traditional eaters, and a vegetarian in the group and we found the menu here suits a range of eaters. It is fine dining food that isn’t too outrageous for the diner who doesn’t take a lot of risks. The food here was absolutely incredible, both in taste and presentation. They describe themselves as contemporary Italian, though to the unknown, you’d probably think it was modern Australian.

Given we had a party of 9, we tried a range of different dishes. Plenty of the options are gluten and/or dairy free and some are also vegan. We sampled the outstanding sashimi version of Moreton Bay bug with chickpea and mint as well as the chilled oysters with freeze dried raspberry, white balsamic. Both beautiful seafood options.

We also shared the impressively presented baked onion with tomato and smoked cheddar (gf/v) as well as the salt baked beetroot, pomegranate, goat’s milk, Szechuan pepper (gf/v). Absolutely lovely.

Given it’s an Italian restaurant, there’s a number of pasta dishes on offer. We tried the Risotto, with nettle, pine nuts (gf/v) and it was thoroughly enjoyed. You can select a pasta as either one of your entrée or main dish selections.

For mains, we enjoyed the amazingly tender dry-aged duck breast, red witlof with pickled blackberries as well as the ever popular, melt-in your mouth beef cheek with roast pumpkin, sage, port. We had a few bowls of the crunchy roast potatoes with rosemary as well.

All meal options were delicious and we could not fault anything.

Desserts were also of a high standard and we sampled most including the salted caramel vacherin, chocolate sorbet (gf), the White chocolate & ginger panna cotta, lime & coconut, miso sablé and my favourite, the Pearl barley ice cream, coffee crumble, caramel. So delicate and creamy.