The best places to eat in Sydney's Inner West

There are only ten items on the all-day breakfast menu, all for less than 20 bucks. The basics are squarely covered, but with added bits of personality. Pickled ginger, mint and coriander adorn the avo toast, for instance, with matchsticks of Granny Smith apple along for the ride.

Chef Jun Okamatsu’s primarily all-day menu remixes home-cooked Japanese dishes with quiet sophistication that’s still approachable. Green tea soba and tempura? Salmon congee? Nigiri? It's all amazing.

The mark of a really excellent vegetarian place is that you don’t even notice there’s no meat on the menu – you’re too busy trying to decide between a bright fresh tasting plate of springtime veggies or the waffles with fruit compote.

A tiny café like Koku Culture brings strangers closer together, but an inventive Japanese-Australian fusion brunch menu is what gets them talking.

The best thing about this sunshine yellow cafe in Haberfield is a menu of sides that’s as long as the mains. You can mix and match streaky bacon, salmon, mushrooms, a tip top house-made baked beans, hash brown or even a single golden pancake.

The very French café and restaurant that has taken up residence in a beautifully restored heritage building along the Glebe foreshore is all about rich, buttery, European dining.

At this meat-free café-bakery they are dedicated to making everything onsite (bread, pastry, pickles, jams, sauces, pasta, sodas and more). They do evening set menus with handmade pasta Thursday to Saturday, too.

Jin Weigu in Campsie where they’re doing powerhouse breakfasts, Northern Chinese-style. Here, as in Beijing or Tianjin, the only way to start the day is with a meal that’s hot, hearty, thick, and filling. No one was off battling the Mongolians on juices and bliss balls.

The famiglia de Luca has been making gelato since 1937 and became a staple on the Sydney treat circuit in the mid-'90s. This is where to go for a Sicilian breakfast of granita and brioche with cream.

It's been nearly four years since ordered the pork hash breakfast. That dish was a revelation and it's still the hot ticket item. And the crowds are still packing out this corner café on a weekend.

The open kitchen is busy putting together breakfast toast and granola, with smoked butter croissants, filled-to-bursting sandwiches and sausage rolls, daily pizza and focaccia, plus sweets so enticing they look stolen from a British story book.

Yes, this is a temple to coffee, but the experience isn’t complete without a toastie. Sometimes it’s a bacon toastie, or ham, or garlic mushrooms, with pickled green tomatoes – the sharpness of the pickle balances the melted gruyère.

Small Talk Coffee is a local pit stop for flat whites, filter coffees and focaccias, fluffy slabs of high GI bread, complete with an oven-blistered crust and a sprinkle of salt. It’s like a big, warm pillow and all savoury dishes from the eight-dish menu are served in, with, or atop it.

This Italian bakery in Haberfield is one of Sydney's most beloved eateries. The cheesecake at Pasticceria Papa has a cult following, and it's not hard to see why. It's made with ricotta and is light and fluffy as a cloud.

Attempt to procure breakfast here on a weekend and you may be met with queues, but a midweek repast is a stroll-in-and-kick-back affair, where you need to decide if you feel like lunch for breakfast or breakfast for lunch. The all-day menu hops blithely from pork cassoulet to Belgian waffles in the very next line item.

You might just pop in for a blue and white tube of fresh custard tarts, but a display case of cakes and fresh creme caramels in a sea of caramel might convince you to have a seat and order coffee too.

Welsh rarebit, buckwheat pancakes, a ploughman's board for brekky or a killer brekky roll are all good reasons to take your empty stomach here.

The Fleetwood team bring their A-game on the food front. Sure, it all fits easily into categories like baguettes, soup, salads, eggs and toast – but like Darryl Kerrigan famously said, "it’s what you do with it".

One of the country's most famous bakeries (thanks to a certain Instagram-friendly watermelon cake) is never without company queueing for their top-tier pies, quiches, cakes and properly melty ham and cheese croissant.

This sunny corner spot on Llewellyn Street is where to go for huge plates of golden scrambled eggs, which is how you justify the fact you're really here for the chococlate chip sea salt cookie afterwards.

From 7am to 3pm, this warehouse conversion draws clued-in customers inside for fancy scrambled eggs, avocado and poached egg on a croissant, and pillowy stacked ricotta hotcakes.

For someone as adept at cakes, Andy Bowdy also knows his way around an impressive sandwich, which is why his lunch menu at Saga is worth a trip when hunger strikes.

You’ll see it stationed on every other table, and all over Instagram. And there are good reasons why the brioche piled with fruit, flowers and hot-pink fairy floss is the pin-up-pretty number that everyone wants to order at this Petersham café.

This is the place to solve all your FOMO breakfast issues, because they have a corn fritter burger on the menu: a bacon-and-egg-roll-meets-fritter baby. The bacon is crisp and the avo aplenty, plus a fritter on a slightly sweet milk bun with housemade barbecue sauce.

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This local isn't rewriting the book, it’s just doing pub things better than most. Want craft beer? It’s on tap. The venue is also dog friendly (and cat friendly, for that matter). The ham-and-pineapple pizza on the kids’ menu comes out of the same woodfire oven as the Margherita for the adults.

This great pub manages to strike an easy balance between being a familiar, cosy watering hole and raising the bar where it counts – the food and drink – and at the Welcome a degree of extra care has been given to the menus.

The beautiful thing about this old boozer is that it’s a pub designed to facilitate a good time on your terms. They’ve even got two separate outdoor areas so that smokers and diners can both enjoy the sunshine, and they let you bring your dog (on a lead) or kid (no lead required, probably).

The most famously family-friendly pub in the Inner West is also a destination thanks to it's bistro menu that applies café sensibilities to a classic counter meal menu.

This famous queer-friendly hotel now boasts a pub bistro with a veggie-heavy menu – there’s vegan ceviche made from coconut and cauliflower and broccoli "wings" with ranch dressing – though steaks and roast pork also feature.

They keep it simple at the redux pub. There are tasty snacks like deep-fried bunched of enoki mushrooms or creamy orbs of burrata, and then you can choose if you're in the mood for steak, or 'expensive steak'.

The bistro here has always been popular, but it’s vastly improved now that general manager Luke Hiscox has brought the operation in-house with Big Arties running the kitchen.

They keep the menu short, but what they do they do very well, especially if the smoker in the backyard has been fired up.

The spacious, low-lit bistro is where the Golden has had the most work done. It’s a seriously family-friendly joint, with cheap kids' meals and activity packs. For fully grown appetites the serves are big, and if you choose your night, also very affordable.

Prime real estate at the Vic is out the back on the huge, covered wooden deck with a shady tree at one end and a fire pit for the odd spit-roast lamb at the other. This is where to eat your burger and kick back.

The Forest Lodge is a diamond in the rough. From the outside this brown brick local doesn’t look like much, but inside there’s a decent feed, plenty of space, a warm welcome and a surprisingly excellent craft beer collection.

Merivale's fancy Inner West pub is a stylish, heavily air-conditioned hideaway for high-end Chinese bar snacks, very nice wine by the glass and cold beer.

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