Mark Best: Perspective at Infinity - A Vivid Sydney Meditation on Landscape, Perception, and the Infinite Meal.

There are nights that arrive with the certainty of display, and others that quietly refuse such confidence - revealing themselves instead as a gradual re-tuning of perception, where sight, sound, and attention are subtly reassembled into something more deliberate, more exacting, and less easily dismissed.

Perspective at Infinity, presented as part of Vivid Sydney 2026, belongs to the latter. Suspended above the city, it is less an event in the conventional sense than a carefully constructed disorientation: a room in motion, a landscape that refuses to remain still, and a series of gestures that seem to ask what it might mean to truly see a place while it is still changing beneath you.

Some dinners don’t sit still… and neither does the view. Above Sydney, everything shifts - including your sense of what a meal is supposed to be.

At its centre is Mark Best, though “centre” may already be the wrong word. What takes shape is not anchored in personality or performance, but in a shifting set of relationships - between altitude and proximity, land and water, maker and made, presence and disappearance. The city becomes something observed obliquely, almost as if through a second consciousness, where familiarity is constantly interrupted by angle.

It is in this unstable field that the conversation begins - not with answers, but with the quiet friction of ideas forming in motion, and the sense that nothing here intends to settle easily into definition.

The title Perspective at Infinity feels almost architectural rather than culinary. It suggests a vanishing point, i.e. a place where distance, memory, landscape and perception converge. What does the idea of "infinity" mean to you in the context of a meal, given that dining is perhaps one of the most fleeting experiences we can have?

Mark Best: The name already existed. Sit with it a while. Infinity as something you’re always working toward, never arriving at. Ephemeral. That’s actually the right framing for cooking a meal with intention.

The feeling arrives and evaporates almost as soon as it’s there. That’s not a problem. That’s what keeps you moving.

With Perspective there’s also something literal in the vanishing point reading. The restaurant rotates. The view shifts, the chapter closes, the next one opens. Nothing is held. You’re always at the point where one thing becomes another.

The landscape is behaving like an ingredient.

Throughout the evening, Sydney itself becomes an active participant in the work. The harbour shifts, the light changes, the city moves around the diner. In many ways the landscape is behaving like an ingredient. How do you approach cooking when the most important element on the plate may actually be everything surrounding it?

Mark Best: The rotation through the landscape does that work. The harbour shifts, the bridge comes and goes.

The question was always: what kind of food earns its place next to that? The answer isn’t food that competes with it. Come for the view stay for the hospitality.

So the menu follows the window. Urban as you look down over the city. Luke Powell’s extraordinary kangaroo mortadella and market garden pasty, the produce of Marrickville and Kyeemagh market gardens.

The harbour comes round and you’re into the maritime chapter. Jamie Newman’s urchins, Tyrrell’s Vat 1 semillon from the Hunter. Then out toward the mountains. Graham Gilmore’s Margra lamb from Tattykeel, Clonakilla’s 2013 Shiraz Viognier from Murrumbateman.

The view is structural. The food responds to it. That’s the whole logic.

You've spoken before about curiosity as a driving force, but what strikes me about this project is its refusal to separate disciplines. Food, scent, sound, design, narrative and place all seem to collapse into one experience. Do you think the future of hospitality lies less in refining cuisine itself and more in understanding how humans construct meaning through all of their senses simultaneously?

Mark Best: A meal has always been more than food. Anyone who’s had a bad meal in a beautiful room already knows that.

Craig Andrade’s regional scents and Gail Priest’s soundscapes work with that. Whether it adds up to the future of hospitality I’d leave to someone else. It felt like the right thing for this room at this moment.

But the portraits are where this gets specific for me. I’ve spent months driving out to these producers. Luke Powell in Marrickville, Graham Gilmore at Tattykeel up in the tablelands, Angela at Argyle Saffron, Jamie Newmans from Sydney urchins, Zhen Wu at the heritage listed Kyeemagh Market Gardens.

I took those portraits to further cement and celebrate the people and relationships behind what we so readily consume. They sit at the table as printed cards throughout the meal.

You’re not just eating what these people grew and made. You can see their faces and where they work. That wasn’t decoration. It was months of time spent before a single dish was cooked, and those relationships shaped the menu itself.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that certain spaces possess the ability to enlarge our inner lives. Looking at Perspective at Infinity, I wondered whether your ambition is no longer simply to feed people, but to momentarily alter their relationship with time. Is the ultimate luxury today not consumption, but attention?

Mark Best: I haven’t read Bachelard, but the idea holds. Some rooms do something to the scale of your thinking. This one holds your attention. Arresting even. shaving said that -

We’re in a period of real attention collapse. People sit in extraordinary rooms in front of extraordinary plates checking their phones. If a meal can briefly reverse that, not through theatre, just through being worth your full concentration, it’s doing something useful.

Vivid puts half a million people into this city over three weeks. Perspective runs two nights. June 10 and 11. A lot of noise, a lot of light, a lot of things demanding your attention at once.

Ninety minutes in the tower, above all of it. That felt like a compelling kind of offer that could perhaps compete in the attention economy.

When people speak about Australian cuisine, they often focus on ingredients, provenance or multicultural influences. Yet what has always distinguished your work is a fascination with landscape as an intellectual idea rather than simply a source of produce. Looking back across your career, do you think Australia's greatest culinary asset is not what grows here, but the unique ways in which distance, isolation and geography shape how we perceive the world?

Mark Best: Yes. That’s closer to the truth than the conversation usually gets. What’s actually interesting is the city itself. A myriad of cultural influences arriving in one place, all of them shaped by the same light, geography and distance that has always defined Australians.

The three chapters in Perspective are a specific reading of New South Wales. Urban: inner-city Sydney, Marrickville, Rozelle, Botany, Surry Hills. Maritime: the harbour and north toward the Hunter. Mountains: Southern Highlands, Orange, Murrumbateman.

That’s not a map of available ingredients. It’s a way of understanding a place that has distinct character in each of those zones, and cooking that reflects it honestly.

I grew up in Murray Bridge. Small dairy town on the Murray River. You cooked what was there. Seasonality wasn’t philosophy, it was just what was happening. No orthodoxy to defend. That’s the freedom.

There is a line by John Berger that "every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography." After decades of cooking around the world and returning to Sydney, what do you think Sydney's character is today, and how does Perspective at Infinity attempt to capture it?

Mark Best: Sydney is confident now. That’s the real change over thirty years. For a long time there was a feeling that the real thing was happening elsewhere and we were catching up.

That’s gone.

The urban chapter of Perspective is its own answer to your question. Kangaroo mortadella from Marrickville, a market garden run by Zhen Wu at the heritage-listed Kyeemagh Market Gardens, Red Mill rum distilled in Rozelle, chocolate made in St Peters with mushrooms grown in the same place, coffee roasted in Botany.

That’s not a curated version of Sydney. That’s just who’s actually producing here. The city is more interesting than it’s ever been, and most of the people making things in it aren’t famous.

What Sydney has always had is the physical fact of itself. The water, the light, the harbour, the way the sky sits over the whole thing.

I’m from the country. I’ve travelled the length and breadth of this continent with my father in a truck. The light of Australia is extraordinary, and Sydney has its own version of it. It can’t exist anywhere else. You carry that when you cook here.

Sydneysiders live in a very small part of their own city. We move between the villages that make it up and mostly stay in our corner of it. From 283 metres you get to dissect all of it. You find yourself lost in the streets from above, wandering through places you’ve only half known.

That’s really what Perspective was. Decoding my own city and my own regions from that literal, physical perspective.

Perspective at Infinity takes place on 10 and 11 June from 7pm to 9pm at Infinity, Sydney Tower.

For those curious to experience Mark Best's exploration of perception, memory and taste firsthand, tickets and further information are available via the Vivid Sydney program.

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Words and questions by AW.

Answers courtesy of Mark Best.