Real Food Pop-Up, Newtown

Good news – the Real Food Pop-Up has re-emerged, this time in Newtown. The store first appeared late last year in Darlinghurst, focusing on hand-crafted, locally made and sustainable goods – think honey collected from nearby suburbs (The Urban Beehive) or muesli made in Surry Hills (Farmer Jo).

Real Food is now making a welcome appearance on Enmore Road – a few doors down from Hartsyard and opposite The Midnight Special. Until April 14, you can drop by and load your arms with feelgood items for your pantry: Cornersmith preserves and condiments, multi-flavoured marshmallows from Sweetness The Patisserie, brews from The Vegan Teahouse and Sticky Chai, and plate-worthy organic sauces and pasta from Pasta Emilia – to name a few of the items worth adding to your shopping list.

Also appealing: there's no Aisle Rage, need to battle queues or endure a supermarket soundtrack from the dinosaur era here. There's a real personal charm to the Real Food Pop-Up. All the produce feels hand-picked and small-batch – so the shop has the appeal of a market stall, in a rustic, farmhouse-like setting, thanks to the recycled fixtures and furniture from Re-Creation, and the vintage homewares by Chris On King.

Real Food opened on the weekend, and I've already made return trips to stock up on a few things (next visit note: I still need to pick up another jar of Cornersmith chilli zucchini pickles – these zippy preserves add zing to even the boringest of work lunches). One of my favourite in-store items is the mango cordial by The Shrubbery – it only has three ingredients and it's pretty much the one thing aiding my summer-is-ending denial. I add fizz and lots of ice and pretend that its sunny flavour can reverse the season's inevitable end.

Despite the unavoidable temperature drop, there is a lot to look forward to – especially here. Real Food's founder Kate Walsh has many things planned and will be running tastings and classes in due course. And on Thursday Feb 28, the pop-up gets properly launched with the help of local craft brewery Young Henrys. Drop by between 6-7.30pm. Or if your diary won't let you, visit this pop-up another time. It's worth the detour. Just make sure you get here before Real Food disappears in mid-April.

Real Food Pop-Up, 27 Enmore Road, Newtown NSW 0423 138 357, ieatrealfood.com.au. Follow Real Food Projects on Twitter or Facebook for updates.

Cafe Nice, Circular Quay

This might be the shortest post I ever need to write – the team behind Fratelli Fresh opened a new restaurant on Friday. It's French. Just go.

OK, so if you're still here – and haven't abandoned this blog in a record-breaking rush – here are some details you might find handy. The place is called Cafe Nice and it's in Circular Quay. It teleports you from one tourist hotspot to another; with the Harbour Bridge by your window, the menu still manages to evoke the South of France with pissaldiere, pistou and Nicoise everything.

One Provencal dish that has a lot of star-recognition is, of course, Ratatouille ($18), and one spoonful relocates you straight into French territory. There's that lovely harmony of garlic, capsicum, eggplant and tomato – all messed through and condensed, so you end up with flavours that evoke the lightness and comfort of summer. Ratatouille – it's a dish that's weighed in sunshine. At Cafe Nice, it's served with grilled slices of bread and slow-cooked egg that is asking for major destruction via toast-dunking. It is a total delight.

The menu moves from light and snap-fresh flavours – Green Beans with Hazelnuts, Pickled Eschalots and Creme Fraiche, for instance – to the heavyweight thud you associate with rich French food. That Daube ($22) of beef cheek with pappardelle, though good, pretty much had Will checkmated from the first bite. The Polenta with Roquefort and Walnuts ($22) was excellent, too: that punchy cheese and savoury pile-up of mushrooms on a cloud bank of cornmeal was perfect company for a night of gusty winds and umbrella-thwarting sideways rain. But it was quite a bit to take on – and hard to finish after I'd (greedily) split three entrees and was maneouvring for dessert.

Your sweet tooth will enjoy this French excursion, though, with a lovely Berry and Lemon Curd Mille-Feuille ($14.50) on offer, or just-as-charming delivery of Peaches and Ice Cream ($14.50). Neighbouring diners did not go for our wimpy light-load approach to dessert – they went straight for the Dark Chocolate Mousse with Cocoa Nib Brittle ($14.50) and were just as direct in enjoying it.

Given that Cafe Nice is in a high-tourist area, I steadied myself for some bill shock. So it was nice to find a lot of reasonably priced items on the menu. The polenta at $20, for this part of Sydney, is a bargain. As is the ratatouille for $18. (And a $7.50 glass of muscadet.) But some other things seem a little off-kilter in how they are charged. The green beans with hazelnuts isn't a substantial serve – it's more side dish than entree – but it comes with a not-so-side-dishey $18 hit, for instance.

It's hard not to compare this place to Fratelli Fresh's signature eatery Cafe Sopra. The city-wide love affair with Sopra (and its four outlets) has rightfully raged on for a while, and it's tough for Cafe Nice to be measured against such an enduring model relationship. You love Sopra, whereas you like Cafe Nice. But still, it's pretty good. Tres bien, in fact.

2 Phillip Street, Circular Quay NSW (02) 8248 9600

Brickfields Bakery, Chippendale

Brickfields, the new cafe-and-bakery-in-one in Chippendale, is full of things to like. There's the "Dranks" selection, which includes Lebonade ($4) and home-made sodas (the Peach one is lovely and lush), and your beverage comes in a half-litre carafe, which you get to splash out into tumblers. It's both classy and fun – no wonder the "Dranks" board has an enthusiastic "hells yes!" written on it.

There's a lot to say "hells yes!" to here. The food, though small and select, is a nice alternative to the usual cafe menu burnout you get when seeing the same things on offer (again). The Beef Brisket, wedged onto ciabatta with radish, anchovy mayo and chilli ($13), rates highly on the "oh my" scale for Will, and the Brickfields staff is not wrong when recommending the Fried Eggplant ($12) because it's "off the chain". Both crisp-edged and caramel-sweet, it really is damn good. It gets good flavour back-up from the lively herbal splodges of zhough, roasted banana peppers, tahini, lemon and a boiled egg that's really there to sanction the fact you're having this for breakfast.

For something lighter, you could have a salad that's full of ribbony zucchini, yellow pear, Tiny Tim Toms (the best-named tomatoes ever), basil and a little crouton jackpot of fried bread ($11.50). Bulk it up with some poached sardine (add $2), if you like.

Or you could skip to dessert and pick up a Persian Love Cake ($4), Sour Cherry and White Chocolate Brownie ($3.50) or Lemon and Polenta Cake ($4.50). We go halves on an Italian Crostada ($4.50), which is so delicious and jammy that, when a waitress is about to take it away (in her clear defence – it looked semi-finished), Will actually swoops in and reclaims the last few plate-abandoned morsels – because there's no way you could allow any of that crostada to end up anywhere but your mouth.

It's no surprise that Brickfields is great, given that its DNA involves Paul Geshos (Mecca Espresso) and Simon Cancio (Luxe). So, the coffee is good and everything baked and flour-dusted is excellent, too. It's also nice to hang out in this underused part of Chippendale, sitting by an industrial counter, enjoying some "dranks", with bags of organic flour and carraway seeds as your neighbours.

Brickfields Bakery, 206 Cleveland Street, Chippendale NSW (02) 9698 7880

Hartsyard birthday cakes

If you need to step up your birthday-cake game, then get something made by Hartsyard. Pastry chef Andrew Bowden will produce something that's traffic-stopping and stunning. I recently placed an order for a party and the resulting creation was so good-looking, it probably deserved star management and its own agent.

The restaurant does custom orders on request – and in fact, Will and I are still grief-struck that we ever finished the spectacular banana cake Andrew made for Will's birthday last year (there were surprise flavour cameos of lemon, caramel, popcorn and coffee in there, too). If I could invent a time machine just so we could reclaim any crumb or frosted shred of that multi-layered treat, I would – it was the best cake we'd ever had.

The one for my birthday has earned a rightful place in the memory bank, too. I asked for something light and fruit-reliant and Andrew fashioned that wispy idea into something impressive: interlacing layers of meringue, raspberry mousse, passionfruit curd and vanilla sponge, all grounded in this addictive layer of hazelnut crunch. All I'd done was turned a year older, but having a slice of this felt like an award for some kind of lifetime achievement.

Hartsyard, 33 Enmore Road, Newtown NSW (02) 8068 1473, hartsyard.com.au

Chur Burger, Surry Hills

Walking up the laneway to Chur Burger in Surry Hills, it's easy to think you've misread Google Maps. This alley doesn't look like it has a place selling bargain buns-and-patties by a hatted chef. And, yet, just when you think the concept seems too good to be true, it comes into view: a graffiti-blitzed eatery serving a menu that maxes out at $10.

And the burgers are great – though it's no jawdropping shock that they are. The food comes out of Albion Street Kitchen; Chur Burger is located in its back yard – just a lo-fi eatery with milk crates for seats, herb planters for decoration and the odd table under the shade (if you're lucky!).

This new venture is the latest for acclaimed chef Warren Turnbull, who has regenerated all his fine-dining restaurants into more casual places – District Dining became Mexico, Assiette (which, at its height, boasted two hats) recently transformed into Albion Street Kitchen and now Chur Burger gives you a good reason to be lurking in laneways.

The menu's short and to-the-point: five pattie options (beef, chicken, pulled pork, crumbed fish or vege), which you can 'upsize' with a milkshake, hot chips or soda. The burgers come on pillowy soft brioche and are impressively sturdy, no-drip affairs. You needn't worry about a laundry disaster or an ingredient avalanche as you clasp the order in your hands.

Mark's grilled beef burger "took a sidetrack somewhere" interesting and was a mustard-mayo-friendly affair, with tomato jam for sweetness and gherkin for tartness. ("All up, I'd go there again in a flash," he says.) Cathy and I both had the vegie burger – a spiced chickpea mixture lashed into place with some honey labne and grated beetroot. We were all impressed by how wonderfully light these burgers were – you didn't get the mid-burger regret of feeling overloaded and unable to finish; in fact, you ended up gently full and satisfied.

Oh and, while Mark prefers his chips "fancy-free", I liked the thick, chilli-dusted fries. We also worked out the best chip-ordering ratio (two between three – one cup each is too much; one between three is regrettably low). We sipped ginger beers between bites, but I'd like to try the apricot shake if it gets back on the menu.

And if you can't make it to Chur Burger yet – because it's currently only open Tues to Friday, between 11am and 3pm (which is tricky for office workers outside the 2010 postcode) – don't worry, there are plans for the place to start operating on weekends. But make sure you detour there eventually. Hopefully you'll find it lives up to its name – which is Kiwi slang for "awesome".

Chur Burger, Beachamp Lane (behind Albion Street Kitchen), churburger.com.au.

Albion Street Kitchen, Surry Hills

If you did an ID check on Assiette in Surry Hills, you'll notice it's not there anymore. It's recently been recast as Albion Street Kitchen, shifting its personality from high-end restaurant to something more casual.

It's not quite as laidback as the eat-with-your-hands mess and joy of Warren Turnbull's other venture, Mexico, but it's more relaxed than its hatted predecessor – where the food was outstanding, but I found the service somewhat starchy and stiff. The wait staff at Albion Street Kitchen employs a good-humoured approach that's many degrees warmer and likeble. They'll joke with you as they size up whether you really are done with your dessert plate or broker peace deals between 'warring' diners (OK, slight conflict exaggeration – Will wanted chips, I didn't; the waitress suggested he get them anyway, but I should be contractually obliged to eat at least three).

Despite the change from Assiette, some fine-dining touches remain: you still are treated to an amuse-bouche and pre-dessert and the milk bread that opens your meal is basically a delicious gateway to consuming as much of the accompanying rosemary-infused olive oil as possible.

And despite the casual slant, there are lot of sophisticated culinary tricks on display. 'Common' dishes have been reverse-engineered into clever experiments: 'cheese on toast', something you might usually eat over the sink in your PJs (it's a classic "phew, glad no one can see me like this" snack, after all), gets souped up with truffle shavings, a pillowy meltdown of cheddar from Tasmania's Pyengana Dairy Company and scatterings of asparagus and Pedro Ximenez. The old beet and goat's cheese salad gets reborn with "cereal": think puffed rice, pepitas, raisins – our waitress jokingly calls it a gourmet 'Just Right'. It's a lucky dip of fun-filled flavours and bracing textures. The dish is dusted through with a crunchy green powder that we had trouble pinning in an ingredient line-up. So we asked and one waitress dryly quipped that they just called it "basil fluff", but admitted they could give it a more fancy name. Basil crumb will do. Pork Belly ($30) rolls with a surprising crew, too: gingerbread spice and salted caramel apple appear next to the more typical veg stand-in of heirloom carrots.

There's also a mac and cheese that comes with grilled vegetables so unusually flat and charred, they look like they've been stretched into zebra rugs. I notice that on Albion Street Kitchen's Facebook, this is being billed as a "lighter" dish. It's fun – a beehive-like terrine of macaroni, with Parmesan cream, braised kale and 'steamrolled' vegies; and maybe it's what you're looking for if you want a strong punch of salt and richness, but it's definitely not an airy, dainty number. In fact, it was too much of a heavy-hitter for me.

At Albion Street Kitchen, you also have the novelty of ordering "cannelloni" for dessert, which comes 'sauced' with pistachio mousse and cherry sorbet ($15). On the night we went, this was so similar to the pre-dessert; the flavour overlap made the cannelloni seem somewhat redundant. Your gravitational pull should go towards the Honeycomb Parfait with Fennel Custard and Pinenut Praline ($15) that Myffy Rigby rightly cheerleads for in her Time Out review. It is ridiculously good and a must-have. Everyone at your table is a winner if they're armed with a spoon and lightning reflexes and this dessert is within easy-reach access.

In fact, you could say that for quite a few things on the menu.

Albion Street Kitchen, 48 Albion Street, Surry Hills NSW (02) 9212 7979, albionstreetkitchen.com.au