Crown Street Dining: Wollongong's Eating Strip Comes of Age

Crown Street, Wollongong's main commercial and dining spine, has developed over the past decade into a hospitality strip of genuine quality, the combination of new restaurant and café openings, the redevelopment of heritage buildings for hospitality use, and the growing food literacy of the local population that the sea change migration from Sydney has accelerated creating the conditions for operators of ambition to establish and succeed. The comparison with Crown Street Surry Hills in Sydney, whose name the Wollongong street coincidentally shares and whose food culture has been an influence on the Wollongong scene, is made less often than the Wollongong food community would prefer, but the gap between the two streets' quality has narrowed substantially.

The Lebanese, Vietnamese, and Italian communities that have shaped the Illawarra's multicultural food culture since the post-war immigration waves provide the ethnic restaurant foundation that the more recent artisan café and contemporary restaurant openings have built upon. The combination of the traditional ethnic restaurants that long-established Wollongong families have been patronising for decades with the newer operators whose cooking reflects more recent culinary influences creates the diversity that a healthy food scene requires.

The coffee culture of Wollongong's CBD has benefited from the Australian café standard's national spread, with the quality of espresso available in the best Wollongong cafés matching the metropolitan standard that Sydney sea changers expect from their daily coffee. The roasters who supply the café market and the barista training that has raised the standard throughout the city's hospitality sector have been the infrastructure behind the improvement that visitors from Sydney consistently remark on.

The weekend brunch culture that Crown Street's cafés sustain provides the social ritual that the professional and student population organises its weekend mornings around, the café as the daytime social space that the neighbourhood pub once provided. The queues that the best brunch venues generate on Saturday and Sunday mornings are the most reliable indicator of the food culture's health and the consumer appetite for quality that the best operators in the city are satisfying.

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