Our favorite taste sensation from The Rocks Market
Travelers looking to stretch their food budget in Sydney have plenty of options. We’re all about stretching our travel meal budget, and Sydney provides plenty of memorable — and delicious — ways to eat inexpensively Down Under.
The Rocks Market offers Foodie Fridays, where a plethora of vendors offer tasty tidbits (our favorite: gozleme). Sydney’s Chinatown has a pedestrian-friendly variety of sit-down as well as takeaway restaurants — along with the occasional walk-up window for grabbing a snack. 7-Eleven shops offer hot meat pies & rolls along with toasties (toasted cheese sandwiches) great for those moments when your wife is about to have a meltdown if she does not get some food right NOW! Harry’s Cafe de Wheels (a Sydney institution) serves up traditional meat pies with mushy peas, mash, and gravy (there’s even a veggie option that’s delicious!). And while we don’t usually recommend eating Macca’s, as McDonalds is often referred to in Australia, they do have free wi-fi, and we were not above buying a soda there for the privilege of using it.
Our hotel (the Mercantile, located in The Rocks, and which we’d highly recommend) included a beaut of a brekkie: cooked to order with eggs, toast, potato pancake, roasted tomato, grilled mushrooms, juice, and coffee or tea! Needless to say, we ate heaps of food to start each day! We also enjoyed snacking at the Sydney Fish Market, which offers plenty of seafood and produce (including what may be the biggest carrots we’ve ever seen!). There’s even an IGA supermarket nearby if you need to round out your picnic lunch.
Sydney Tower splurge dinner
Of course, we’re all about eating inexpensively when we travel so that we can really enjoy a guilt-free culinary splurge. In Sydney, our culinary splurge was dinner at the restaurant atop the Sydney Tower. The revolving restaurant offers 360° views of Sydney, as well as a vast buffet that makes you wish you’d skipped lunch. Touristy? Perhaps. A budget meal? Definitely not. But it was quite a memorable experience, and since we’d saved on our food budget in other ways, we felt like it was worth paying for the view!
What tips do you have for stretching your food budget on vacation? Share your tips in the comments! And enjoy a tasty week or weekend!
A Week or a Weekend 
Ah that tower-top restaurant is great isn’t it? But definitely a splurge. I used to study at the Conservatorium of Music and I remember my colleagues and I would walk back to Wynyard Station every evening, past that tower. One time we decided just to go up and order ONE drink. Turns out even orange juice costs a veritable arm, leg and other miscellaneous limb, and we left quite quickly! But it was really beautiful 🙂 Some great budget tips by the way!
Hopefully they let you at least look for free! Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy your week or your weekend!
They did 🙂 No worries you enjoy too! I am currently at a Tuesday, so ‘week’ it is. You?