bill's

"Sydney loves Bill Granger's with it's sun-filled room and huge communal table. Breakfast dishes like ricotta hotcakes with fruit and honeycomb butter, and sweetcorn fritters with roast tomato, spinach and bacon are worth writing home about"

Or so says the Lonely Planet's "Best of Sydney". So here I am, writing home about it.

The first thing to say about bill's is that bill Granger dislikes the way his name looks when you spell it with a capital B, which is why his restaurants are called "bill's" and why I'm deliberately using the lower case, much as it pains me to do so. The second thing is that the toilets in his Darlinghurst restaurant are outside. An outside dunny is no laughing matter in the middle of the winter. Never mind the aesthetics (or otherwise) of his christian name, he needs to get onto a plumber. Sharpish.

If you haven't heard of bill Granger, he's a famous Aussie chef, as you've probably gathered. He sometimes used to turn up on the BBC programme "Saturday Kitchen" and perhaps he still does but since it switched to ITV it's never been the same and we gave up watching it ages ago.

bill has three restaurants in Sydney and they never fail to make the "best of" guides so they've somehow earned a place on the definitive list of "must-do" Sydney experiences, especially for foodies. We've been meaning to go for ages and finally pitched up there this morning.

Everyone in Sydney knows bill's and everyone advises first-timers to go to the Darlinghurst restaurant because it's the original. The restaurant sits on a quiet corner of Liverpool and West streets and it's hard to spot because it doesn't announce itself as you approach. It's not far from St Vincent's, a hospital styling itself as boutique, which presumably means none of their theatre gowns fit and the nurses sneer at the punters. Like I've said before, if I ever get ill, I'm heading for the Royal North Shore.

Anyway, bill's attracts the hospital crowd as well as wanabees and journalists and media savvy types, all of whom apparently want to sit at the communal table and rub elbows over glossy magazines. There's a nice atmosphere inside but I didn't spot the famous communal table or the glossy magazines because I had my head stuck in the menu trying decide between his signature dishes, the ones everyone raves about, like the toasted coconut bread apparently so popular that he daren't take it off the menu.

In the end we ordered two coffees (long black with a jug of hot milk on the side) and two portions of the corn fritters with a side order of mushrooms and eggs. And this was the first sticking point because bill is so proud of his scrambled eggs (another signature dish) that you can't have them any other way. Not poached, not fried and certainly not boiled. Now I've got an issue with this because eggs are another of my obsessions. I'm a great fan of eggs and over the years I've collected a number of egg-related implements including a long-handled spoon for boiled ones and a double-decker egg slicer for salads and sandwiches.

Of course, I wasn't going to reveal the egg hobby for obvious reasons, you know, what with revealing the stuff about bridges and planes and ornate tiled verandahs, but there comes a time you have to stick up for what's right and I'm sure you'll agree that serving only scrambled eggs is fundamentally wrong, especially in a restaurant famed for its breakfasts.

Anyway, the breakfast was okay. No, it was nice, but the guide book is wrong because it wasn't anything to write home about, not even the scrambled eggs, which aren't a patch on the ones at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester. The toasted coconut bread was tasty but too dry and the butter was so hard I had to rub it onto the bread with my fingers to get it to melt.

The only thing to write home about at bill's was the bill. $64 for two breakfasts. We're going to try the one in Surry Hills, just to be sure, but there are far better breakfasts to be had down at Coogee beach for half the price.