Hanuman

The Restaurant

Hanuman opened in 1992 inside the DoubleTree by Hilton on Mitchell Street — the central Darwin dining corridor — under chef-patron Jimmy Shu, a Malaysian-born Australian chef whose cooking across Indian, Thai, and Nonya traditions has shaped the Top End's modern dining conversation for three decades. The restaurant has won every major Northern Territory hospitality award available — Tourism NT Hall of Fame, NT Restaurant of the Year on multiple cycles, AHA Northern Territory Awards — and remains the city's most internationally recognised dining room. The format reads as a polished, awards-conscious restaurant rather than a tropical-Asia counterpoint: a hundred-and-forty-cover dining floor across two linked rooms, an open kitchen visible from the bar, and a service team trained at urban-Australian fine-dining tempo.

The kitchen serves a menu organised across three regional cuisines: Indian (with deliberate Goan and Tandoor depth), Thai (with a Bangkok-courtyard rather than street-food orientation), and Nonya — the Peranakan Straits-Chinese cuisine of Penang and Malacca that Jimmy Shu's family heritage drives directly. Signature plates include the Hanuman oysters (Top End-Sea oysters with chilli-and-coriander dressing that opened the restaurant on day one and have never left the menu), the tandoori barramundi, the Nonya curry laksa, the slow-braised Hanuman lamb shank, the Goan king-prawn curry with kokum, and a sharing barramundi for the table that the captains plate at the counter. The format is deliberately Asian-shared rather than Western-individual — the room ordering across a table is the working format Hanuman has championed since opening.

The wine programme runs to about a hundred and sixty labels with a deliberate Australian regional emphasis — Margaret River whites, McLaren Vale Grenache, Tasmanian Pinot, Alpine Valley Riesling — selected with a working sommelier's eye for what actually pairs into the chilli-and-spice repertoire the kitchen requires. The cocktail bar at the entrance — built around tropical-fruit and Asian-aromatic infusions (lemongrass, kaffir lime, tamarind, galangal) — is the working pre-dinner credential. The Mitchell Street address sits four minutes' walk from the Darwin Waterfront precinct hotels and the Esplanade, which keeps the post-dinner geography simple. For a Top End evening that needs to register as the city's working signature dining-room statement, Hanuman is the only address that has held the seat for three decades.