‘You’re meant to slow down here’: The day-to-night cafe bringing country vibes to Newtown

While walking past Nest in Newtown a few weeks ago, I was stopped in my tracks. The full dining room, with its bare wooden tables, tall pressed-tin ceilings and flickering candles, seemed transported. King Street’s buses, cars and foot traffic might be racketing away outside, but inside, it felt like a country-town restaurant at dusk.

At Nest, where you pull up a metal chair under trailing ivy and a low-looped web of bare lightbulbs, there are warm paprika-dusted duck-fat-fried nuts – peanuts, cashews and hazelnuts slow-cooked in duck fat for two hours – along with Jerusalem artichokes with 𝄒nduja butter, and pâté made from mushrooms grown five minutes’ walk away at Ruffles Farm in St Peters. There’s also Robin Butler, Nest’s chef and owner, ready for a chat about the food and drinks that brought him back to Sydney after leaving the big smoke for rural life over a year ago.

Cafe by day, restaurant by night, Nest may look familiar to denizens of Newtown’s south end – the site used to be Rolling Penny cafe, and Butler first started here in 2017. He sold the joint in 2025, exhausted by the “mayhem” of Sydney life (not to mention keeping a business alive through COVID-19) and headed west to work at The Globe Hotel in Rylstone in the Central Tablelands.

Here was more space and more time, but also a new connection with the region’s food and wine producers, including De Beaurepaire Wines, Eaglestone Farm’s free-range eggs and The Globe’s expansive vegetable and herb backyard allotment. Rural life changed Butler.

“I realised that if you don’t understand the amount of effort and time and beauty that goes into providing products for us in Sydney, you’re just going to continue pulling meat out of packets, eggs out of cardboard boxes,” he says. “I’ve become very passionate about it.”

Then the new Rolling Penny owners offered him the lease back, and Butler realised he still had a city itch. The “Nest” name is inspired by his own – Robin – but it’s also a nod to making the cafe “like a home”. “Night service, day service, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “You’re meant to feel warm, and you’re meant to slow down here.”

By day, people flock for sobrasada and Ortiz anchovies on focaccia with fried eggs, caper cream and duck-fat potatoes, but also for a New York-style pastrami sandwich that is so loved that Butler is always increasing his meat order. Well-seasoned and smoky, its crunchy bread holds Russian dressing, blushing pink pickles and oozing gruyere.

By night, Butler talks deeply with diners about the compact menu. Highlights include bitter leaves with pink peppercorn mustard, cured egg yolk and smoked gouda, and a beautifully crunchy slab of lavosh laden with cool kohlrabi shards, soft cured yellowfin tuna, smoked crème fraîche and tarragon oil. Coronation chicken Maryland (Butler’s mother’s favourite dish) is perfectly executed with a pina colada glaze and delicate moru curry.

There are wines from De Beaurepaire and Jessop in the Central West plus Young Henrys beer. Cocktails are imminent. Butler is also running seasonal set-menu dinners featuring DJs playing ambient electronics, Afro-fusion, percussive house and more.

I know my dinner selection tonight will be changed in a week because Nest’s menu is reworked nine times a year. Seasonal, creative and, in Butler’s words, chefs getting “spectacularly, impressively bored” are the forces behind that. Rest assured, however, the country-town nature of this escapist day-night cafe is here to stay.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.