Sienna Marina has been feeding Woolloomooloo since 1999. Breakfast through to dinner, seven days a week, in a room where nobody minds how long you stay.
The cooking is Mediterranean and it is generous. Grilled seafood, slow-cooked meats, pasta, pizza and plates built to go in the middle of the table. Good produce, cooked simply, served without ceremony.
We open early and we stay open. Coffee and breakfast in the morning, a proper lunch in the middle of the day, happy hour from three, and dinner that runs on into the evening. Come for one of those, or stay for all of them.
Plenty of well-known faces have eaten here over the years. They got the same table and the same welcome as everyone else.
Sienna Marina has been here since 1999. Timir Patel has been looking after it since December 2023.
He came to it the long way round, through the kitchen. Chef de partie at the Manly Skiff Club, working up to head chef. The Channel 9 head office, cooking for the Today show, The Footy Show and an end-of-year party of fifteen hundred. Head Chef NSW for the Redcape group, and a nomination for Best Regional Chef at the 2019 AHA NSW Awards. Then a kitchen of fifty-three at Camden Valley Inn.
Buying Sienna changed the job. These days he runs the floor as well as the kitchen: the greeting, the seating, the checking in at tables. He kept the team who were already here, twenty-one people who know the room better than anyone. If you’re in for dinner, he’s probably the one who says hello first.
Mediterranean, in the broad sense of it. Grilled octopus, zucchini flowers, burrata and sizzling garlic prawns to start. Pizza and pasta through the middle. Slow braised lamb shank, a pancetta-wrapped filet mignon and a proper scotch for dinner. Greek and caprese salads, sides worth ordering on their own, and tiramisu at the end.
Mornings are the exception, and deliberately so. That is when the kitchen turns Australian: eggs how you like them, smashed avocado, the big breakfast, and a brekky burger for the mornings that call for one.
Classic cocktails, beer on tap and wine by the glass. And happy hour every day from three until six. We call it Aperitivo.
Book a table, or just turn up. Both work.