Oncore by Clare Smyth

Altitude, Ambition, and the Long Arc of British Cooking

There is a particular tension in arriving at a restaurant on the 26th floor of a casino tower. The lift opens, Sydney Harbour arranges itself across the glass, and the immediate question is whether the kitchen can hold its own against that view. At Oncore by Clare Smyth, the answer is framed by a consistent La Liste score of 97 points across both 2025 and 2026. The room does not need to oversell itself. The harbour does some of the work, and the cooking is expected to do the rest.

The broader context matters here. Modern British cuisine has undergone a long reappraisal over the past three decades, from the gastropub movement that began redeeming pub cooking in London in the 1990s, through the Michelin-level re-evaluation of British produce and technique that followed. What emerged from that arc, the idea that restraint, seasonality, and classical French rigour applied to British ingredients could produce cooking of genuine authority, is the tradition Oncore draws from. Clare Smyth's London restaurant CORE by Clare Smyth sits at the originating end of that lineage. Oncore is its southern hemisphere extension, which is a different kind of project: not a replica, but an attempt to transplant a culinary philosophy into a city with its own produce logic and its own expectations of what a serious meal looks like.

Where Barangaroo Places This Restaurant

Barangaroo's transformation from industrial waterfront to high-density hospitality precinct has been fast and uneven. Crown Sydney, which opened in 2021 after years of regulatory delay, concentrates several of the precinct's most formally ambitious restaurants within a single tower. That concentration creates an unusual competitive environment: restaurants in the building are not competing with the street outside so much as with each other and with a small set of Sydney peers. Rockpool, operating in a different format and tradition, represents the longer-established end of Sydney's premium dining conversation. Oncore arrived with international parentage and a specific brief: to operate at the level its La Liste scores suggest, within a city that has its own well-developed fine dining vocabulary.

For visitors arriving from elsewhere in Australia, the positioning is legible by comparison. Brae in Birregurra and Flower Drum in Melbourne both operate in the same upper register of Australian fine dining, each with distinct culinary traditions and long track records. Oncore is newer and its tradition is imported, which creates both a challenge and a specific kind of appeal: it offers something Sydney's restaurant culture does not already produce from within.

The Gastropub Inheritance at Altitude

The editorial angle here is direct. The gastropub revolution that reshaped British dining from the early 1990s onward was not simply about putting better food in pubs. It was about a shift in ambition, the conviction that serious cooking and unpretentious hospitality were not mutually exclusive, and that British produce deserved the same attention French kitchens had long given their own. That conviction scaled upward through the 2000s and 2010s, producing a generation of British chefs who combined classical training with a renewed interest in native ingredients. Clare Smyth's trajectory sits inside that larger story: her training under Gordon Ramsay, her three Michelin stars at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, and her subsequent work at CORE all trace a line from that broader British culinary rehabilitation.

Oncore, under Chef Alan Stuart, operates within that inheritance at considerable remove from its source. Stuart carries the lineage forward in a market where Modern British cooking has no deep local roots and where the competition, from Firedoor in Surry Hills to Botanic in Adelaide to Cutler and Co. in Fitzroy, draws more directly from Australian produce traditions. That positioning makes Oncore an outlier in the local landscape, which is part of what makes it worth examining on its own terms.

What the Awards Data Actually Tells You

La Liste aggregates critical scores from guides and publications across multiple countries, weighting its final rankings accordingly. A 97-point score in both 2025 and 2026, no movement between the two years, indicates stability at a high level rather than momentum in either direction. Within the La Liste framework, scores above 95 typically correspond to restaurants operating in or near the upper tier of global critical recognition. For context, that places Oncore well above the midfield of Australian fine dining and in a comparable set that includes a relatively small number of domestic restaurants.

4 across 579 responses give a separate signal: the restaurant is reaching a broad enough audience that the score is statistically meaningful, and the gap between public approval and critical recognition is not dramatic. That consistency across both professional and popular assessment is one of the more reliable indicators that a restaurant is performing coherently rather than playing to a narrow audience.

For comparison with what that level of recognition looks like in other Australian cities, Bacchus in Brisbane, Amaru in Armadale, and Dan Arnold in Fortitude Valley occupy different points on the spectrum of Australian fine dining ambition. Carlton Wine Rooms in Carlton and 400 Gradi in Brunswick East operate at different price and format points, useful for calibrating what the premium end of the market represents. The international Modern British conversation extends to venues like Moor Hall in Aughton, which provides a useful reference point for the tradition Oncore is working within.

Planning a Visit

Oncore sits inside Crown Sydney at Level 26, 1 Barangaroo Avenue. Advance reservations are essential, and the dress code is smart casual.