Big Stone, North Sydney

One of my favourite cuisines is Japanese. One of my favourite dining concepts is tapas. Put them together and what do you get? Big Stone, a modern Japanese tapas restaurant in North Sydney! I love the quirky touches inside the restaurant, from the hand painted murals to the pot plants hanging from the ceiling in wicker baskets and the gorgeous light fixtures over the bar.

Big Stone

Anya Hindmarch Counter Culture – A/W 2014/15

Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Coco Pops and crumpled-up chip packets may not seem like luxury fashion items – that is, unless you are Anya Hindmarch. I’m a huge fan of this British designer’s ability to merge whimsy and humour with luxury materials and practical features to create some seriously covetable accessories. Hindmarch’s London Fashion Week collection, Counter Culture, is all about “seizing the moment to ‘get happy’”, and achieves this by transforming regular supermarket products into glamourous handbags and clutches that look good enough to eat.

Coco Pops Imperial Clutch

Nobu, Southbank

Nobu Matsuhisa’s first restaurant in the USA was located in Alaska and went up in flames after just weeks of trading. It’s fair to say that things have only improved since then. Nine years after his ‘Bombe Alaska’ (yep, I went there!), Nobu opened a Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant in Beverly Hills and soon became one of the world’s first celebrity chefs. There are now 22 Nobu restaurants around the world, including one in Melbourne which opened in 2007 at Crown Casino.

Nobu