From traditional Australian dishes to international cuisine, the Fairy Meadow restaurant scene caters to all taste buds and cravings.
Whether it’s Japanese, Lebanese or Australian pub fare, if you’re feeling a bit peckish take a look through the selection in your own backyard.
In no particular order, let us take you around the world with some incredible flavours and cuisines that we're loving in Fairy Meadow right now.
Fujiyama Teppanyaki Restaurant
Love real Japanese food? The teppanyaki experience at Fujiyama includes a master chef cooking your food barbecue-style right before your eyes to create an entertaining experience. Ideal for group bookings and family outings, you’ll watch as the chefs chop, toss, marinade, slice and juggle your food in front of you. For a calmer dining experience, the downstairs or balcony areas offer Asian fusion dishes. Along with specialising in Japanese cuisine, the restaurant also offers a large selection of Chinese food for lunch and dinner.
12 Daisy St
The Charles Hotel
This Fairy Meadow staple features a beer garden with a huge range of beers on tap, Charlie’s Bistro with burgers and classic Australian pub food with regular specials, large Sports Bar with state-of-the-art facilities, and affordable and recently renovated accommodation by Nightcap Hotels.
The bistro menu includes the freshest, locally sourced and house-made ingredients. The Charles Hotel hosts daily events, promotions and giveaways.
98 Princes Hwy
Fairy Meadow Bowling Club
Centred around bowling competitions, the club also entertains through a host of events, such as musical acts, raffles and trivia.
Along with the entertainment, Fairy Meadow Bowling Club is also known for its bistro with a classic menu and generous serves. Menu items include seafood, steak, chicken and burgers, along with a kids menu. The venue also includes specials and seasonal event menus, like New Year’s Eve and Australia Day.
2 Cambridge Ave
Fraternity Club
A venue packed with dining options and entertainment, you can take your pick.
Dining options include La Trattoria, featuring a cosmopolitan menu and authentic Italian flavours with large portion sizes of pastas, meat and poultry dishes, and seafood dishes. You can choose to eat indoors with a dedicated bar and room to seat 300 people or in the al fresco dining area, while the kids play in the enclosed outdoor playground. For something more special, book a two-course banquet.
Alternatively, try Il Bene, which has become the home of authentic Italian wood-fired pizzas. Creating a traditional pizza restaurant atmosphere, it features hand-made pizzas using quality ingredients.
11 Bourke Street
Spice Kitchen Mauritian and Thai
Within an intimate setting, Spice Kitchen offers a fusion Mauritian and Thai cuisine using fresh produce with aromatic spices and herbs.
Incorporating traditional cuisine from the owners’ heritage, the restaurant is renowned for surprising guests with unique dishes from its vault of recipes. Each dish has a focus on fresh ingredients from local farmers’ markets.
The restaurant also caters for special events, including birthdays, business lunches, dinners and cocktail receptions.
Shop 1/128 Princess Hwy
Cabbage Tree Hotel
Featuring classic pub fare, menu items range from schnitzel to steaks, to wings and burgers. Cabbage Tree Hotel is also renowned for what it says is “the best sports bar in country NSW”, featuring sporting events up on the big screens, meat raffles and trivia nights.
The venue also offers function packages for events, including baby showers, birthdays, bridal showers, baptisms, engagements, weddings and Christmas parties. It can help arrange everything from a 2m gold window arches, floral arrangements, balloons, candy cart, light up numbers, and table decorations.
73 Princes Hwy
Al Amir Lebanese restaurant
An authentic Lebanese restaurant, it prides itself on offering the full flavours of classic Lebanese cuisine.
The Al Amir menu includes cold and hot mezza dishes, food from the grill like kafta mishwe, mixed plates for one, banquets to feast for four or more people, salads like tabouli, and traditional mains such as Mansaf chicken and Shish Barak.
Ambience Centre, Shop 6, 118-126 Princes Hwy
Outback Steakhouse
Part of a chain of restaurants in New South Wales and Queensland, Outback Steakhouse is renowned for its steaks and seafood.
With an extensive menu, it offers appetisers, signature steaks, Outback favourites like lamb chops, pasta, combination dishes like Surf and Turf, and burgers and sandwiches.
It also serves up a range of cocktails and other alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
228 Princes Hwy
Fairy Meadow Silver Restaurant
If you love Chinese food, Fairy Meadow Silver Restaurant caters for everything from honey chicken, to sweet and sour pork, and Mongolian beef. With generous meals, the restaurant also caters for children’s meals.
100 Princes Hwy
Dhok Koon Thai Restaurant
For authentic Thai food set within fancy decor, Dhok Koon provides a great experience and large portion sizes. Dishes range from pad thai, duck, green curry and red curry.
23-25 Princes Hwy
Looking for more cafe style food? Check out the 10 best cafes in Fairy Meadow.
To learn more about the area or buying, selling or leasing a property in Fairy Meadow and surrounds, contact Joanne on (02) 4285 7400.
Do you want to know what your property is worth in the current market? Search your address for an Online Property Report.
You might also be interested in
Feb 23, 2024
Local story: Mass For You At Home TV series
Did you know Australia's longest running commercial television show Mass For You At Home is filmed right here in Fairy Meadow? The television show, which started in 1971, was moved from Melbourne to Wollongong when the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong won the tender in 2021. The 54-year-old show is filmed at the St John Vianney Co-Cathedral in Fairy Meadow four times a year over the span of a week. However, this year the show nearly didn’t go ahead. Executive producer/director Daniel Hopper shares why... Why did Mass For You At Home start? It was done out of Melbourne for 30 years prior to us. My understanding is they would film it at the Docklands Channel 10 Studio. They would film the entire year in January because, with the cadets and all the trainees, Channel 10 would use that as their training base for all their crew. They would shoot it all in three and a half weeks for the entire year. The whole purpose of it is for those that can't get to Mass - and this is way before the internet. The main audience has always been those in prison, in nursing homes and in aged care facilities - those that can't be in their parishes and can't get to church. It wasn't to replace the Mass... it was for those that couldn't be there, giving them some spiritual solace. It’s been going for 54 years now. How did the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong come to produce it? In about 2020, the crew responsible for the production handed it over to the Australian Catholic Bishop’s Conference, which is the ACBC - the peak body for all dioceses. That's when COVID hit. We started doing our Bishops Masses online. So when COVID hit, we couldn't go to church - we weren't allowed to during the lockdowns - so we started filming our Bishops Masses online and putting them up. We were one of the few that did pre-records instead of livestreaming it. We could do a three-camera shoot, and we could do it properly at the co-cathedral in Fairy Meadow, which is a nice church. We would do that each week. We would usually just shoot two a fortnight. Then when Melbourne said they couldn't do Mass For You At Home anymore, and they were only going to do it up until the beginning of Easter 2021. They'd seen what we'd done with the Bishops Masses and they said, "Would you consider taking this on or tendering for it?” I said, "Well, personally, it would be awesome. I can get the gang back and we get to do this, but it's a lot of work to do on top of your already full-time job”. I hadn't done broadcast TV before. It was another situation with God, saying, ‘Well, if you open this door, I'll walk through it and we'll see where it leads’. We won the tender and then we started. Our first one was on Easter Sunday 2021. How regularly do you film the episodes? We used to shoot five times a year, whereas now we do it four times a year. It takes a week for each of those. The whole thing was that if it truly is a national ministry entity, it shows around the entire country – in every regional station in Australia and every capital city. So I wanted to make sure that it's representative of that (by having priests flown from around the country). Is there a reason for the St John Vianney Co-Cathedral in Fairy Meadow? There’s a couple of things with that church – it’s aesthetically pleasing, which is why I chose that church. There's a tabernacle in the centre - so there's always a centre point of Jesus in the tabernacle. So every angle you're shooting from, you've always got that as a reference point in the background. So when you're shooting between three different cameras and you're editing, there's always a crossover and you're always in that same space. And then theologically, having Christ in the centre is always good. We bring our own lights in, but it has a lot of ambient light... so we can actually use the natural light. The carpet on the floor is better for sound. And the light-coloured background - a lot of churches there are a lot of dark woods and I didn't want that to be the face of what the church is. We want it to be welcoming. It doesn't feel closed in. It feels nice. It's welcoming. And it's reflective of what we're trying to do and what the mass is supposed to be. So the choice of that church is quite intentional. I's part of the Cathedral Parish. You’ve got this, for instance, we have the Xavier Cathedral here (St Francis Xavier Cathedral in Wollongong), and that's a co-cathedral. That's very rare. There are not many co-cathedrals in Australia. Fairy Meadow is bigger. For larger events, they couldn't fit everyone in there (Xaviers), so they use that one. But it means also that it's not used all the time. If you want to book it out for a week, it's easier to do with minimal disruption to them. There's many of those days where we can do a Hollywood wrap, which means just leaving it as is, walk out, walk back in the next morning. Do you receive much feedback from viewers? Our whole funding model is on fundraising. It's not cheap to do this. We do the production on the smell of an oily rag. We rely on people... donating to us. We get a lot of feedback from letters, phone calls, comments on our socials and on YouTube. The bishop then gets a lot of letters, and he gets a lot of letters from prisoners. I get emails all the time from children saying their parents had just passed away, but they'd watched the show every single day. It was their comfort, their solace, and their last thing to do before they died. For the first years - 2021 and ‘22 - we went over our fundraising target. It was like, this is brilliant. I thought, how good are we? Then last year, with the interest rate, with the cost of living... we were behind by about $100,000 at the end of last year. Then come early December, we got a letter out of the blue - someone giving us $96,000 in their will. That meant we could do it again. The Catholic Diocese of Wollongong will now continue until its contract runs out at the end of the year, with no plans yet set for the show’s future. Mass For You At Home airs on Sunday at 6am on Channel 10 and Foxtel, and and is repeated five times daily and repeated episodes on Ten Play. To learn more about buying, selling or leasing a property in Fairy Meadow and surrounds, contact Joanne on (02) 4285 7400. Do you want to know what your property is worth in the current market? Search your address for a Online Property Report.
Jan 26, 2024
Local Business: Villa D’oro moves into Fairy Meadow
The opening of Villa D’oro in Fairy Meadow brings its owner Claude Guido back to where his food story all began. Claude started as an apprentice at The Fraternity Club in the ‘70s and today has adapted his own 23-year business from one that caters for functions to now offering a cafe and at-home dining experiences. Over the years, it has transitioned from catering for balls, real estate fundraisers, networking events and weddings at the Flinders Street Function Centre to at-home dining picked up from the Croation Club in Figtree during COVID when functions were no longer possible. The business has kept up this pickup menu long after lockdowns have finished - but is now based in a new home, it's cafe at 12-16 Princes Hwy Fairy Meadow. Here is Claude’s story. When and how did the business start? We were well known for our function centre in Flinders Street. We had that for 23 years and then COVID hit in 2020 and that put a total grind to our business. Obviously everyone was starting to get concerned and staff were getting concerned and me being the owner, I was concerned for my family and our business. So we decided to sell some pastas to make ends meet for a little bit of time and that took off and here we are today. Out of COVID, a new business was born. What was your hospitality experience prior to that? I did my apprenticeship at The Fraternity Club in the ‘70s. I also managed Portafino in its heyday. I bought Villa D’oro in 2001 and was there till 2023, and then we got the sad news that (we had to move out of the venue). We had to think about what we were going to do and I was still umming and ahhing as to whether I still wanted to do functions or if I'd had enough of functions. Then out of the blue, this shop became a thought. We thought well, we've got six to eight months to kill and so we went to the Croatian Centre at Figtree. We kept doing our takeaways and our catering business out of there. That was handy and they were very good to us. They wanted us to stay there. We moved here (in November) and away we’ve gone. Why is at-home catering still popular post COVID? I think the products we were making were a good product for a reasonable price. We were probably fortunate that we've got a loyal clientele base and just kept coming – and still do. That at-home menu, which is our pickup lasagnes, cannellonis, veals, chickens, all those is still more than 60 per cent of our business. Why Fairy Meadow? I guess because the opportunity arose. I kept looking around this area because I thought what we wanted to create here was that someone would come in and order a fresh plate of pasta, we'd put it in a takeaway container and they can go home and eat it or sit outside and eat it. Then the idea of that panini was born and we're doing a fairly good trade of that as well. But it’s our lasagnes and cannellonis - people just walking in grab a tray of lasagna or cannelloni. The trade we’re getting from people just walking in, it’s quite impressive. You had been doing functions like weddings, graduations and balls for a long time at Flinders Street Function Centre. What do you now enjoy about catering? We didn't do too much catering. Not that there wasn’t a need for it, but we didn’t probably promote that area, whereas we promote it now because it’s part and parcel of our business. The catering is a huge part of our business now where we drop off food to people's houses, surf clubs, wherever they want us to. We did a wedding last Saturday for a beautiful couple at home and we do some corporate events at places, but most of the catering we do is just for mums and dads that might have 30-40 people over. How have you been finding the response so far? A lot of the community around Fairy Meadow has popped in to say hello to us. We’ve had a massive response from the businesses around Fairy Meadow. It was the pastor who said it to me that you realise a lot of the hospitality businesses are coming towards this area where we are. And I started to think and he’s kind of right, you've got Pizza Hut, you've got us, there's a cafe and a couple of pizza places. I think it’s location. It's easy in and out. You're just off Towradgi Road. Learn more about Villa D’oro. To learn more about buying, selling or leasing a property in Fairy Meadow and surrounds, contact Joanne on (02) 4285 7400. Do you want to know what your property is worth in the current market? Search your address for a Digital Property Report.