The best restaurants in Coogee, Clovelly & Maroubra

Louie is a beloved coastal-chic neighbourhood restaurant with Italian-style food, natural wines and banging tunes. The menu changes based on seasonal availability, but you'll find snacks and starters including things like zucchini flowers with pecorino, mint and honey, and scallops saltimbocca – then plenty of pasta options, and mains including eggplant parmigiana, pan-seared fish with smoked tomato, pippis, chickpeas and fresh herbs; or O’Connor black Angus sirloin or rib-eye. It's all yum.

Yana stands for ‘you are not alone’. It’s a fitting name for a restaurant designed to bring the community together. The concept was spearheaded by chef Sam Lane who wanted to recreate the feeling of sitting around a campfire, telling stories and tucking into delicious, honest food. This is pretty much what you can expect to find at Yana. The fire is there alright. It’s in the centre of the open kitchen, and you can smell the smoky notes when walking in. Nearly everything on the menu has been licked by an open flame – even the housemade focaccia.

At this slick, Mediterranean-leaning wine bar and restaurant you can keep it classic with cheese and charcuterie if you're down for simple snacking in the front bar, or go hard and follow some freshly shucked Sydney rock oysters with a bowl of Alaskan king crab pasta or MBS 5+ Wagyu scotch fillet with brandy Dianne sauce and crisp king browns. As the name suggests, they have a large wine list (400 labels that span Australian and European drops).

A whole 17 years after Britain’s most famous seafood chef took his business Down Under, Sydney finally has a Rick Stein restaurant. And it comes with something his two regional NSW restaurants no longer offer: Rick’s world-renowned fish and chips. Deep-fried in dripping. It's located on the ground floor of the InterContinental Sydney Coogee Beach, and the menu is almost exclusively seafood, plucked from the stalls of Sydney Fish Market every morning.

Osteria Coogee brings a piece of Italy to the 2034 postcode. It's the perfect seaside restaurant for aperitivo hour, a casual plate of pasta, date night or family catch-up. There's an R'n'B bottomless lunch offer every Saturday from 2pm – $99 a head (minimum four people) for olives, 18-hour-fermented foccacia, burrata with tomato and pickled mustard seeds, fried pizza, paccherri pasta with lamb ragu and salsa verde, gnocchi with porcini truffle cream, endive salad with Caesar yoghurt and garlic breadcrumbs (that gives you a sense of the type of food on offer) – plus bottomless Peroni, prosecco, wine or cocktails. (Though note that the menu changes seasonally.)

Sydney is blessed with many high-end, waterfront dining rooms, but Mimi’s is truly a thing of beauty. This fine-diner takes up the majority of the second floor in the Coogee Pavilion, with larged arched windows that look out onto Coogee Beach. Repurpose a wad of cash from your future travel fund and use it to treat yourself here instead. What's the menu like? As an example, the two-person set menu ($260 per head) gives you: a serve of their special bread with sour cream butter; blue fin tuna toro with confit tomato and a warm crumpet; a bougie potato scallop with caviar; bunuelos with manchego; seafood crudo or steak a l'Americaine; mud crab tagliolini; BBQ sommerlad chicken with sweet corn crepe plus desserts. If you can afford it, you're in for a good time.

Being by the beach is all well and good but once the sun goes down the surfboards, goggles and togs get put away and those sun-kissed bodies need a place to let off steam. That place is the Coogee Bay Hotel. There's no shortage of spaces throughout the hotel for a feed – choose your own adventure, whether that's in 'The Garden', the sprawling 'Beach Bar & Dining' space, the Art Deco-style Arden Lounge, or the Sports Bar.

Coffeeroom is a café at the south end of Coogee beach, which serves up delicious panini, local Tuga pastries and single-origin coffee. It has a warm, Scandinavian-style fit-out, with honeyed natural timber, polished concrete, exposed bricks and pops of soft colour.

'Best chicken burgers in Sydney' – it's a topic that gets people more fired up than the grill itself. Sydneysiders are passionate about their chook burgers, especially when it comes to the Portuguese style with chilli and mayo. Little L is one of those spots that is regularly mentioned among the top spots in Sydney – and we have to agree it's up there. Their Classic Chilli chicken burger ticks all the boxes: tender-grilled chicken, chilli sauce with just the right amount of spice, a generous spread of mayo, plus cheese and crisp lettuce on a fresh roll.

Think house-cured and spiced sustainable salmon from New Zealand, with juicy tomato, slivers of onion, bursts of salty capers and a generous slathering of herb schmear, encased in a chewy yet crisp-on-the-outside perfect bagel, baked fresh every morning. This is the classic bagel from Lox in a Box, a much-loved chain that serves traditional Polish bagels. They also have less trad flavours, including their Buffalo bagel with hot sauce, ranch dressing, salad and cheese; and their Katsu, with tonkatsu sauce, slaw, pickled cucumber and miso mayo. Stop on by the Coogee outlet with sandy feet and a big appetite.

A local favourite since 2008 (but originally located in Surry Hills) Sugarcane is a South East Asian restaurant with elegant takes on dishes from Thailand, Malaysia and more – plus vibrant cocktails and a 100-strong wine list. In fact, the great wine list is one of the things that helps this place stand out from similar styles of restaurant. Come for a spicy-good time.

This is a hole-in-the-wall bánh mì spot in Coogee, and Time Out's Rebecca Hegedus reckons that they serve up, without doubt, the best bánh mì in the area. "It’s been around for years and there’s almost always a line down the street, which says it all." They have other locations in Parramatta, Auburn and Smithfield.

This is a pretty little room on Arden Street, just up from the beach. They're open every day from 6am to 2pm, and they serve up cafe classics. They’re a nice team with a good vibe. What more could you want from a Coogee cafe?

At the time of writing, Johnny Gio's has 27 – yes, 27! – locations across Australia, and we reckon the fact that it's a franchise is the reason it's not critically acclaimed for serving up some of Sydney's best pizza. Despite that franchise fact, you can tell a lot of love goes into making each pizza that JG boxes up. It's a reliable spot for an affordable takeaway.