Farra Perth
Greek$$
I don’t know about you, but “the rise of Greek hotel restaurants” wasn’t on my Perth dining trends bingo card for 2026. Yet as we approach the year’s halfway mark, local diners find themselves in the curious situation of having not one, not two, but three such dining rooms vying for their drachma.
The first item in our Hellenic Snack Pack is Greek by George Calombaris: a four-
week pop-up that opens at the casino next weekend and strikes me as more of a
marketing exercise than an attempt to further local Greek food culture.
Restaurant number two is Yefsi, the in-house café at the Limnios family’s Greek-
inspired Northbridge hotel, Attika. Yefsi isn’t just an eatery that feels on-brand for Attika, it also feels like one that works and draws steady crowds after dark.
Which lead us to lucky contestant number three as well as the Greek hotel dining
room of greatest interest to eaters: Farra Perth, the ground floor restaurant
anchoring the three-month-old Hyde Hotel.
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On paper, Hellenic cooking and the tanned, table-hopping vibe of the LA-born Hyde brand read like an odd couple. But in practice? Finding yourself cocooned in this Instagrammer’s paradise of linen, soft furnishings and pastel hues while swiping pinches of doughy flatbread through sturdy snowdrifts of tzatziki will make you wonder why more Perth hotels aren’t baking flatbreads to order. (Or hanging their own yoghurt when making dips. Or putting limniona, savatiano and other indigenous Greek grapes on wine lists.)
One reason: not every hotel has an Aaron Moore on the pans. Moore might not have been born in Greece, but the Greek islands were where the Belfast-born lad got his start in hospitality. Having arrived at Farra via years spent honing his craft at Bread in Common and Coogee Common, he and his sous chef Jack Henderson have the skills and insider knowledge to rework Greek food for modern-day diners.
Seafood feels like a major strength. Grilled arrowhead squid stuffed with a risotto
flavoured with sujuk (a dried sausage made by smallgoods wizard Paul Marinovich of Adrian’s Continental Smallgoods) is as glorious to look at it is to eat. A slash of skordalia made with taro rather than potato is a clever accessory for precision-cooked octopus: chewy and crisp in all the right places.
The prognosis for turf is just as promising as that of the surf. Alongside large-format grilled meats – pork tomahawks, a hefty lamb shoulder designed to feed a crowd – small plates featuring phyllo pastry housing air-dried beef and a fermented chilli and cheese sauce (a cool riff on the Greek pie pastirmopita) reiterate the truism that size doesn’t matter. Nor does the price tag of your ingredients.
From earlier this year: barely cooked deboned Albany sardine fillets – essentially raw except for a brief blow-torching as they leave the kitchen – paired with a vivid tomato salad are a reminder that so-called baitfish, when given a little TLC, are just as capable of blowing minds as any other bit of seafood.
Pan-fried mizithra dumplings – ricotta gnocchi by another name – slicked in a bright green sauce of zucchini and basil are a pointed reminder that Greek cooking is about more than heroic quantities of meat.
Like any hotel restaurant, Farra makes concessions for the needs of guests and
travellers: think steak, oysters and good chips. Yet similarly, management aren’t
afraid to cast conventional hotel restaurant wisdom to the wind too.
Loukaniko and htipiti are among the lesser-seen, harder-to-pronounce dishes on
offer. (Thankfully, engaging staff happily translate names and explain dishes, so
smart phones can stay in our pockets and purses where they belong.) The
restaurant is also a burger-free zone. If you really want one, hit the lobby bar which is where breakfast is served in the mornings alongside a dishy lunch deal during the week.
But if a souvlaki with chips and a drink for $26 isn’t enough of a reason to head to Perth’s East End, the desserts should do the trick. A joint production between Moore and team member Jane Metero – a future talent, mark my words – the sweet stuff includes the head-turning Olive Alaska. Picture a regular Bombe Alaska, only with a savoury grey olive ice cream nucleus and scraps of sour cherry throughout, all arranged on a bird’s nest-like base made of golden strands of kataifi pastry.
Did Moore and Metero need to go as hard on desserts as they did? Probably not.
But like the rest of team Farra, they have no interest in letting themselves be defined by or held back by the “hotel dining room” tag.
Farra is a great restaurant, full stop. That it happens to be in a hotel only strengthens its appeal as well as the growing maturity of the CBD food scene.
The low-down
Atmosphere: a confident modern Greek restaurant and kitchen team to watch very, very closely
Go-to dishes: kalamari yemista ($28), pastrimopita ($26), Olive Alaska ($20)
Drinks: a good snapshot of contemporary wine styles plus a smattering of Hellenic names and styles. The Greek accent is a little less pronounced in the bar.
Cost: about $200 for two people, excluding drinks
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
