The City as Ingredient: Mark Best's Perspective and the Strange Luxury of Paying Attention.

There are restaurants that attempt to suspend reality. They dim the lights, isolate the diner from the outside world and construct an alternative universe in which the plate becomes the only object worthy of contemplation.

Then there is Perspective.

Rather than shutting Sydney out, Mark Best's latest work invites the city to the table and quietly allows it to dominate the conversation.

The experience begins conventionally enough, with drinks in Bar 83. Yet even there something feels slightly unsettled. You are not waiting for dinner so much as ascending into a different way of seeing. By the time the lift deposits guests at Infinity, the city has already ceased to function as backdrop. It has become the principal actor.

Much contemporary dining speaks obsessively about provenance, as though listing farms and fishermen were itself a philosophy. Best proposes something more ambitious. His argument is that landscape is not merely where ingredients originate. Landscape shapes perception. Geography produces culture before it produces food.

As the restaurant slowly rotates 280 metres above Sydney, this thesis unfolds almost imperceptibly.

The room itself becomes a clock.

Urban density dissolves into harbour. Harbour gives way to escarpment. The Great Dividing Range slowly replaces glass towers, and suddenly the city appears less like a metropolis than an ecosystem negotiating with itself.

Best remarked to us before the event that "the landscape is behaving like an ingredient."

Experiencing the dinner, one realises this was not metaphorical.

The menu does not accompany the view. It follows it.

Some chefs plate food. Mark Best appears to have plated half of New South Wales and persuaded Sydney to rotate around it.

The opening Urban chapter could easily have descended into predictable metropolitan cleverness. Instead, Luke Powell's kangaroo mortadella arrives inside a crumpet enriched with Jersey curd and rooftop honey, somehow collapsing Italian charcuterie, Indigenous fauna and inner-city beekeeping into a single gesture. Nearby, the Banksia Market Garden pasty quietly references one of Sydney's least romantic yet most culturally significant landscapes: the market gardens that have fed the city for generations while remaining largely invisible to those who consume them.

The accompanying Archie Rose Cosmopolitan Milk Punch appears almost mischievous. Clarified to crystalline precision yet layered with finger lime, roasted pineapple and native botanicals, it performs exactly what Sydney often does itself - disguising extraordinary complexity behind effortless brightness.

Then the room turns.

So does the conversation.

The Maritime sequence may be the intellectual centre of the evening. "Five Perspectives of the Sea" resists conventional plating and instead behaves almost like edible field notes.

Sydney urchins carry that unmistakable iodine sweetness of tide and rockpool, while oysters arrive with a kind of geological exactitude - briny, sculpted, and deliberate. Together, they collapse any lingering divide between luxury and place, tasting instead like the shoreline itself made edible. Paired with Tyrrell's Vat 1 Semillon, one of Australia's great age-worthy wines and a personal favourite, the effect is less about pairing than resonance. Both speak in mineral dialects.

Around this point another element begins asserting itself.

Craig Andrade's fragrances drift almost unnoticed until one realises memory is now participating in flavour. Gail Priest's sound design similarly avoids spectacle, operating instead like architecture for the subconscious. Neither seeks attention. They alter it.

Many restaurants now describe themselves as "multi-sensory," usually meaning that music is playing while something arrives beneath a glass cloche.

Here, scent and sound function differently. They create atmosphere without announcing themselves as atmosphere. They are editing perception rather than decorating experience.

It recalls something Gaston Bachelard once suggested: That certain spaces enlarge our inner lives. Infinity achieves precisely this because it manipulates scale. Looking outward, the city shrinks. Looking inward, attention expands.

Best himself framed it differently when we spoke.

"We're in a period of real attention collapse," he observed. "People sit in extraordinary rooms in front of extraordinary plates checking their phones."

Perhaps the most elusive luxury in 2026 is no longer scarcity, but intensity - things distilled rather than diminished.

For ninety minutes, Perspective invites guests to surrender distraction and return, however briefly, to a more deliberate kind of attention.

The Regional chapter confirms this philosophy with surprising restraint. Graham Gilmore's Margra lamb, stuffed and roasted with saffron and garlic cream sourced from Angela Argyle's extraordinary New South Wales saffron operation, demonstrates that technical accomplishment no longer needs to perform itself. Fermented potato with goat cheese and Snowy Mountains trout roe becomes an essay on elevation, fermentation and freshwater ecosystems disguised as comfort food.

The Clonakilla Shiraz Viognier Museum Release from 2013 deserves separate mention. Great wines possess architecture rather than flavour, and here its tertiary complexity mirrors the landscape now unfolding beyond the windows. Both reveal themselves slowly, rewarding patience over immediacy.

Perhaps the evening's most quietly radical gesture arrives not on the plate but beside it.

Months before service, Best travelled across New South Wales photographing his producers. Their portraits appear throughout the meal, transforming suppliers from anonymous names into individuals with faces, landscapes and histories.

In an era where provenance has become marketing vocabulary, this feels almost confrontationally human.

You are no longer consuming ingredients.

You are entering relationships.

The final Urban return, with Lion's Mane mushroom folded into chocolate mousse alongside canelé scented with rooftop honey and Red Mill rum, closes the circle without sentimentality. Sydney is once again the subject, but now understood differently. What initially appeared metropolitan reveals itself as ecological. The city contains farms, apiaries, distilleries, fungi cultivators, cheesemakers and artisans operating within kilometres of one another yet rarely imagined together.

That, ultimately, is Best's achievement.

He is not documenting New South Wales. He is decoding it.

For decades Australian cuisine has explained itself through multiculturalism, seasonality and exceptional produce. All true, but insufficient. Best suggests something more interesting: Australia's defining ingredient may actually be distance. Distance between coast and mountain, producer and consumer, attention and distraction, familiarity and rediscovery.

From Infinity, Sydney appears simultaneously intimate and unknowable. Streets you have walked hundreds of times become abstract geometries. Harbours become topography rather than postcard. Suburbs collapse into light.

The city acquires what John Berger once argued every city possesses: An age and a character entirely independent of demography.

By the evening's end, one leaves with surprisingly little memory of individual courses compared with an enduring memory of looking.

That is perhaps the highest compliment possible.

Many chefs can create remarkable dishes.

Far fewer can persuade you that the most important ingredient was the city itself.

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Words by AW.

Photo courtesy of Infinity / Trippas White Group.