Myffy Rigby

Myffy Rigby treats restaurants and bars as culture, not just places to eat, and her coverage follows the mood, rituals and energy of going out as closely as the food on the plate. She writes restaurant criticism and food features for The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Food section, where her work sits inside the masthead’s entertainment and lifestyle coverage but is driven by a deep focus on dining culture. Across reviews, guides and features, she connects chefs, rooms, menus and crowds into a single narrative about how people actually eat, drink and spend their nights.

Restaurant reviews and the feel of a night out

Rigby’s core work is reviewing new and notable restaurants, with an emphasis on how a night unfolds from arrival to last bites.

In her review of a demi-fine Japanese spot serving some of the best sushi in Bronte, she not only reports on the precision of the nigiri but also the “coastal ease” of the room and the interplay between careful cooking and energetic service, treating atmosphere as part of the offer rather than background detail. Her coverage of Alessandro Pavoni’s latest pizzeria project leans into unorthodox toppings and scorched crusts, using the controversy around non-traditional pizza as a hook to explore creativity, fun and the way diners negotiate ideas of authenticity. She returns often to openings that stretch familiar formats - beachside Italian ventures with gelato bars and cafe components, casual spaces led by serious chefs, and restaurants that blur fine dining with neighbourhood comfort - and her reviews tend to weigh how well those concepts translate into an actual night out.

Her writing style is direct and vivid, favouring short, sensory descriptions over lengthy technical breakdowns.

She pays attention to how guests move through a venue, how staff engage, and how design, music and crowd shape the experience, so a review reads as a walkthrough rather than a checklist of dishes. The food is still central - precise nigiri, exciting “saucy carbs”, charred pizza bases and standout signatures get clear, concrete treatment - but it is framed inside the social experience of eating, which distinguishes her work from purely plate-focused criticism.

Guides, lists and the Good Food Guide perspective

Beyond single-venue reviews, Rigby uses lists and guides to map broader patterns in the restaurant scene. Pieces such as “The 10 snacks of summer: Your by-the-numbers guide to dining in Sydney these holidays” show her interest in format-driven service journalism: structured, numbered recommendations designed to be used rather than simply read. Her Good Food Guide writing, including editor’s letters and features on Sydney’s “restaurant explosion” around the 2022 Guide, positions her as a curator of trends, calling out shifts in price points, styles and neighbourhoods and then linking them to specific restaurants worth attention.

She has edited the Good Food Guide over a stretch of years, giving her an overview of the dining landscape and a framework for grading and contextualising individual venues inside that bigger picture.

Lists of Sydney’s top bars and round-ups where chefs and fellow reviewers nominate their favourite places to eat show how she draws other industry voices into her coverage. In these pieces she balances her own taste with contributions from restaurateurs, bartenders and critics, producing a composite view of what matters right now. That same guide-maker perspective informs her magazine work: she now edits a title dedicated to global restaurant culture and continues to write features that celebrate restaurants at every pitch and price point, from high-end destinations to casual spots that simply get things right.

Bars, drinks and late-night culture

Rigby devotes significant attention to bars and drinking culture, treating them as a distinct but connected strand of going out.

Her Good Food Guide bar coverage highlights brewpubs, tequila bars, neighbourhood drinking rooms and cocktail specialists, with equal interest in the drinks lists and the social function of each venue. In an industry conversation on the “death of spontaneity,” she engages with how modern food and drink culture has become curated and planned, and how that changes the way people experience bars and restaurants. That perspective shows up in her writing on al fresco drinking, bottle shop and bar pairings, and late-night venues, where she tracks small rituals - grabbing a particular bottle, sharing a specific snack, choosing a corner of a bar - as part of the story.

Across this coverage she often links the glass to the room: what is poured, how it is presented, and how the setting invites or inhibits spur-of-the-moment decisions. She is interested in how brands and venues position themselves but keeps the focus firmly on the customer’s night, which gives her bar writing a clear, user-centred feel rather than a trade angle.

Travel, profiles and personal narratives

Rigby’s work also extends into travel and profile features that still orbit food and hospitality. In travel pieces for The Sydney Morning Herald she writes about destinations through their restaurants, inns and local food scenes, using small-town dining, Michelin-starred rooms and casual neighbourhood spots to explain why a place feels the way it does.

Her nightlife guides walk readers through evening itineraries in specific suburbs, tying together bars, restaurants and streetscapes into coherent routes that show how locals actually use their city after dark.

She writes occasional profiles and cover stories that bring personal narratives into the frame, such as conversations with designers and creatives about family, home and motherhood where food, open doors and shared meals function as recurring motifs. Outside the newspaper, she hosts a chef-focused video series and appears as a presenter and moderator at food events, where she interviews cooks and restaurateurs and translates their kitchen work into accessible stories.

Taken together, these pieces show a through-line: Rigby is interested in the people, habits and places that make up dining culture, and she uses every format available - reviews, guides, travel writing, profiles and video - to describe that world clearly and concretely.