The Restaurant
Nick Hildebrandt is not simply a good sommelier. He is one of the most admired wine professionals in the world, a man who has spent three decades building a cellar at Monopole that represents, by the consensus of the people in the best position to judge, the finest restaurant wine list in Australia. The 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide named it Wine List of the Year. Subsequent guides have confirmed what regulars already knew. When you sit down at Monopole and open the wine book, you are in the company of someone who takes wine as seriously as any kitchen in Australia takes its cooking.
The restaurant was founded originally in Potts Point in 2012 as a European-style wine bar by Hildebrandt and chef Brent Savage, then relocated and reimagined in the CBD in 2020, where it found its current form: a French restaurant and wine bar of genuine substance. Savage's menu pays proper homage to the French bistro tradition — duck rillettes with cornichons and grilled bread; steak tartare hand-chopped to order; sole meunière cooked with butter in the manner it has been cooked since Escoffier codified it; a cheese trolley that requires a decision the kitchen has made easy by the calibre of the selection. The French direction, adopted in 2024, brought clarity of focus that has made the kitchen more compelling than at any previous point in the restaurant's history.
The room is sophisticated without being intimidating: warm lighting, a bar that catches the evening well, tables at a sensible distance from each other that allow real conversation. For solo diners, the bar seats are among the finest in Sydney — you can work through Hildebrandt's by-the-glass selection, which runs to around 30 options at any given time, with the support of a sommelier team whose enthusiasm for what they are pouring is genuine rather than performative. Monopole is the restaurant you book when you want the drink to be as good as the food.
A seven-course tasting menu with paired wines — in the range of $260 per person at the premium end — represents one of the most considered value propositions in Sydney fine dining: you are paying for two exceptional things simultaneously, and neither compromises the other.
What to Order
If you are serious about wine, order the sommelier's selection by the glass and let Hildebrandt's team direct the evening. The steak tartare is the kitchen's most assured dish and the correct introduction to the menu: hand-chopped, precisely seasoned, served with toast that has been grilled rather than baked. For a main, the sole meunière is the most French thing on the menu and represents the kitchen at its most technically honest. The cheese trolley, featuring selections from Australian and French producers, is the correct conclusion to a dinner at Monopole — and the accompanying wine suggestion from the sommelier team is invariably worth taking.
Best Occasion: Solo Dining
Monopole is the finest solo dining address in Sydney for anyone who cares about wine. The bar seats face the restaurant and are positioned with the natural intimacy of a Paris bar à vins; you are alone but in the best possible company, with Hildebrandt's team available to guide you through a by-the-glass selection that covers fifty years of French and Australian wine history in a single evening. The staff understand that solo dining done well is one of the most pleasurable experiences a restaurant can provide, and they calibrate their attention accordingly — present when useful, absent when not. See our guide to solo dining restaurants in Sydney.
For a close-the-deal business dinner where the client cares about wine — and more executives care about wine than any other dining signal — Monopole is the correct choice. The wine selection communicates effort, knowledge and seriousness in a way that the food alone rarely achieves. Read our Sydney business dining guide.
Also Consider
For a French dining experience at a higher register with more elaborate tasting menus, Sixpenny in Stanmore is Australia's most precise fine dining room and equally wine-serious. For CBD business dining with a more straightforward power-room atmosphere, Bistecca on Bridge Street offers a different kind of singularity of purpose. Explore all 26 listings in the Sydney restaurant guide.