Rose-coloured glasses — Local Paddo

It’s fair to say that Phil Wood is a sentimental bloke. Talk to him for a while and he may mention some old-fashioned ingredient, maybe even Keen’s curry powder.

“I think when I started on this menu all of the dishes had a bit of Keen’s curry powder in them,” he laughs. “I wanted to look back on classic Australian dishes and bring in some little touches of nostalgia, in a way. I went through the CWA cookbook and the Common Sense Cookery Book. We do have a culinary history in Australia, we just need to remember it.”

It turns out that only one dish — snapper with roasted almonds and Keen’s curry vinaigrette — on the menu at Wood’s new Paddington restaurant, Ursula’s, prominently features the curry powder that’s so famously enclosed in a bright orange tin.

But sentiment and nostalgia nevertheless run thickly through a menu that includes lamb rump with Brussels sprouts and mint sauce, and golden syrup dumplings with rum, raisin and malt cream. In fact, you could probably fashion an entire meal at Ursula’s and pretend you’d never left the 80s.

“We do feel as though the place has come full circle,” the chef says. “It’s gone back to the place where it was at the beginning.”

Perhaps the weight of history sits heavily on Wood’s shoulders, for it’s true Ursula’s has moved into one of Sydney’s most historic restaurant sites. Located on the corner of Hargrave and Elizabeth streets, it was home for 40 years of the inimitable Darcy’s restaurant and for a much shorter time more recently, Guillaume’s, the flagship fine diner of celebrity chef Guillaume Brahimi.

It’s a site steeped in restaurant folklore, but for five years it has stood vacant, ready for the right team to come and bring it back to life.

Wood and his wife Lis Davies have certainly done that, excavating Brahimi’s damask wallpaper to paint the walls a Tuscan ochre and populating the space with bistro tables and chairs, sheer curtains, carpet, little glass table lamps and the couple’s own artwork.

It’s not quite a bistro and not quite a fine-diner, but somewhere in between, a unique beast in a Sydney restaurant market obsessed with the Merivale group's heavily styled brasserie look.

“We want it to be warm and homely,” Wood says. “We want it to be like one of those great restaurants of Europe that are run by an owner-occupier who has it forever.”

As he puts it, Ursula’s has the feel of a family restaurant that travellers occasionally have the good luck to unearth in the back streets of Paris or, perhaps, New York City, where little gems can be sought residing in the basements of brownstones in unusual locations.

Even the menu itself, a four-page A5-sized folded cardboard carte complete with a watercolour print on the cover, has a quaint sense of continental yesteryear about it.

“We wanted the whole restaurant to be comfortable,” Wood says. “We wanted it to feel like you’re coming into someone’s home.”

Not that the menu is all old school. Wood places an emphasis on produce and seasonality and there are plenty of modern flashes in dishes such as a local lobster salad with mango, cashew and XO, or pork chop with spring onion, nacho, shiso and gochujang.

Desserts range from a very modern pandan custard with lime granita, pineapple sorbet and meringue to a decidedly old-fashioned peach melba. The wine list, too, feels fresh and young, with plenty of good value (especially European) drops to discover.

For Wood and Davies, the step into owning and running their own venue comes after careers spent working for some of the biggest names in Australian hospitality. Davies is by trade a publicist, while Wood was Neil Perry’s longtime lieutenant at the Rockpool Group.

Most recently, the couple were on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula where Wood was executive chef at the upmarket destination winery restaurant, Pt. Leo Estate. That was before the lengthy Victorian lockdowns, and the arrival of their first baby, daughter Cressida, prompted a return to Davies’s hometown of Sydney.

“Perhaps it does seem a strange thing to do, to open your own restaurant and step out of the safety of the big restaurant group, but we want to show that it can be done,” Wood says. “But if we can’t do it, nobody can do it. The big groups have come to monopolise Sydney, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s room, too, for an independent operator.”

So far, the couple say locals have been overjoyed with the arrival of the new restaurant in their midst.

“The reception has been wonderful, to be honest. We really wanted to be part of the little Paddington neighbourhood and we feel accepted already,” Wood says.

“We want the locals to be proud of their neighbourhood restaurant. We want them to bring people from overseas and interstate here and show them what we have in Paddington. To say, ‘Look, this is our restaurant, this is what Paddington is’.”

Ursula’s

92 Hargrave St

ursulas.com.au