Our hearts were broken when Mr Liquor's Dirty Italian Disco called it a day on their pop-up pasta party inside a former drive-thru bottle shop behind the Tennyson Hotel in Mascot.
But in excellent news for plate hunters in Sydney, a new tenant is moving into the space: this time around it'll be Potts Point's Italo-Asian diner ACME.
They're leaving the spaghetti and black garlic at home with the new venture and looking east for inspiration from the Khmer cuisine of Cambodia. ACME's Mitch Orr and Cam Fairbarin will be joined by Lillia McCabe, who has finished up a stint at Blackwattle in Singapore, and Sophia Thach, whose Khmer heritage was the leaping off point for Kingdom of Rice.
Cooking will be done on wok and charcoal and the share-style dishes will feature the full roster of South East Asian flavours: we're talking lemongrass, ginger, turmeric, galangal, garlic, chilli, fermented fish paste, fresh herbs, lime and Kampot pepper.
The interiors are channeling the street side shopfronts in Phnom Penh, but happily they're keeping the self-serve booze fridges in place, stocking them with Cambodian and Asian beers and natural wines.
Kingdom of Rice opens October 2018 at the Tennyson Hotel, 952 Botany Rd, Mascot 2020.
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