“For the first three weeks in this job, I couldn’t stop looking out the window,” Mark Best reveals about his newfound enchantment with Sydney Tower, the home of the revolving restaurant he took over in August 2025, when launching Infinity by Mark Best.
“Sydney, as you know, is a series of tiny little villages and I’d find myself wandering the streets with my eyes. Out on the other side you’ve got the mountains at sunset and then the other way, the harbour and it's almost like an iconic Brett Whiteley painting…”
For someone who hadn’t ever visited the venue in his 34+ years-long career (much like most other Sydneysiders), this sort of enthusiasm counts as high praise indeed. And now he is determined to change the commonly held perception about this ‘touristy’ venue.
“I want to make it a proper, beautiful restaurant in the sky,” Best says in his signature understated style. “And that means going back to the critical things – good food, good service, good atmosphere. I love the conviviality of a great restaurant table. And I see it as a place to really champion Australian food and wine.”
In quite a bold move, the restaurant features an all Australian wine list. And almost all the food is locally sourced – “everything except the caviar” – whether it’s sea urchins from Shellharbour in Illawara, dairy from Dubbo, and oysters from Merimbula, or olive oil from South Australia.
Why would he look beyond, he questions, when so much of the produce that can be procured locally is “benchmark quality”? As a chef whose passion for cooking was born from a childhood in South Australia surrounded by food and wine, and fuelled by travelling through regional France in his youth, this focus on produce seems perfectly understandable.
“It was during this time [travelling through France] that I fell in love with the way produce was simply treated,” he says. “It is recognisable, yet elevated. Your job as a chef is to elevate the intrinsic properties of what you are using. But the craft becomes subliminal to the product.”
New horizons
And it is this ethos he will bring to life in his masterclasses at the Horizontal Festival, a celebration of regional food and drink, music and art taking place in the Southern Highlands on October 4-5, 2025.
“I’ve always enjoyed these types of events where I can spread the word about good food and good wine to a wider audience,” Best says. “I’m using a lot of local growers from the Southern Highlands in my menu, and I hope that from sessions like these, people get to learn a little bit about the importance of provenance, seasonality and start using local growers in their own kitchen.”
Horizontal Fesitval is held in the surrounds of Centennial Vineyards in Bowral.
“I’ve seen this change happen across Australia – I’ve seen the multicultural society that makes up this country really come into its own, and change what people eat,” Best says. “I’ve seen the suburban high streets grow more and more representative of the cultures that live there… And while every city has its own unique identity, I think the diversity of restaurants and the bar scene in Sydney is truly remarkable.”
When asked what his favourite cuisine is, Best doesn’t miss a beat when saying “the cuisine of Australia. And I’m not going to attempt to define it – that’s the beauty of it.” What he does attempt to do is communicate the destination and its culture through food – something he feels his three culinary heroes: Rick Stein, Madhur Jaffrey and Keith Floyd do very well. Safe to say he continues to succeed in this attempt.
