"Where the night is full of dangers / And the darkness full of fear / And eleven hundred strangers / Live on aspirin and beer." No one has ever topped poet Kenneth Slessor's summation of the supposed 'dangers' of Sydney's Kings Cross.
'The Cross' trades on big, bad yarns about itself - tales of underworld figures (euphemistically known as 'colourful local identities'), bent cops and industrial-strength sex and drugs (minus much rock n' roll these days). These are the tales that still draw the Saturday night parade of suburban rubber-necks and tourists from everywhere; it seems everyone wants to bring home a story of vicarious vice from the Cross.
Even though the Cross always claims to have cleaned-up its act (but never quite does), in the last decade it has become home to some of the most interesting, and not necessarily most expensive, restaurants in Sydney. The ambience, at least off Darlinghurst Road's 'stripper strip', has shifted from sleaze to style, while the score of budget lodges along leafy Victoria Street, Potts Point attest that backpackers, like others, are attracted mightily to the ambiguities of the Cross.
Parts of Potts Point, Rushcutters Bay and Darlinghurst are lassooed into the general zone known as Kings Cross - and some desperately try to wriggle out again, fearing a drop in status and property values. Ten different people may define in ten different ways the boundaries of Kings Cross, including 'there's no such place'. For decades there was no Kings Cross post office, thus - it was argued - there could be no such suburb. Perhaps the Cross is more an experience than a place. If so, there's little dispute that the strip of Darlinghurst Road that runs from William Street to the fountain at Macleay Street is at the good and evil heart of the matter.
The Cross's northernmost outpost may be the venerable pie-cart on Cowper Wharf Road, Wooloomooloo, known as Harry's Cafe de Wheels. Since World War II, this caravanserai for the famished and insomniacs, parked at the gates of Garden Island naval base, has sold bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potato) and pie floaters (a meat pie floating in pea soup - terrible but true!) that have fuelled the fleet, not to mention generations of wharfies, cabbies and left-over party people. Harry still accepts no known credit cards.
It's difficult to single out particular establishments from the Cross's approximately 100 restaurants and 40 coffee shops - plus, like politician's promises, they're no sooner here then gone. 'Stayers' to keep in mind if you're foraging are Xu (in the Millenium Hotel, top of William Street), Joe's Deluxe Cafe, Delectica, Matchbox, Roys Famous and the upmarket Mezzaluna (all in Victoria Street, Potts Point), Morgans (Victoria Street, Darlinghurst), Tuk-Tuk Thai and Bayswater Brasserie (in Bayswater Road), the Odeon (Orwell Street) and the perennial, always-open Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar at the El Alamein fountain.
To sample the budget end of the Kings Cross culinary parade, try the little eccentric places that still hang on. Pralinka (Roslyn St) serves Bohemian homestyle beef paprika goulash, while the timewarp New York Restaurant (Kellett St) still charges 1980s prices for a fair fillet steak.
Victoria Street on the Darlinghurst side of William Street has become Froth Alley, overflowing like one of its own cappuccino cups with ever-opening (or going broke) coffee shops. Among the best are some of the street's oldest and youngest coffee bars, the irrepressible Bar Coluzzi, phone booth-sized Latteria and the Tropicana (of Trop Fest short film competition fame).
High above the intersection of Victoria, Darlinghurst and William, on the first floor of the Elan block, is the very stylish Dome Books Cafe where there's a great view down William Street to the city.
Kings Cross has always lurched between the profane and the ridiculous. Cashed-up tourists sail unperturbed past a reef of winos. Internet cafes rub shoulders with a Australia's first legal injecting room. In the alleys off William Street, persons of imprecise gender totter between the contending altitudes of heroin and high heels. There is no point in pretending that, just because Victoria, Macleay and Kellett streets have experienced a restaurant-led makeover, the Cross is now where Mary Poppins shops. (If she does, it's probably at Porky's Adult Shop where peculiar plumbing is sold as 'marital aids', much of it to rather unmarried-looking people.) In the Cross the closest thing to truth is still contradiction.
Ask any Kings Cross resident about where in Sydney they feel safest on the night streets? The answer is where they live. With the insomniacs of Darlinghurst Road playing up until dawn, and with numerous 24-hour shops, the main drag of the Cross is a far more secure place than many other Sydney suburbs. Ultimately, it's also whatever you make of it.
Keep a clean nose. Look at, but don't photograph the working girls and strip club bouncers on Darlinghurst Road. Mind your own business - and the Cross is cool.
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Wander a bit further down the street from Kings Cross to Potts Point, where you'll find some of Sydney's most boutique and exclusive restaurants.
Peter, Bondi.
Bourbon & Beefsteak, one of Kings Cross's most well known landmarks, is a place to go celebrity spotting. It's a common hang out for cricketers and footballers alike. It's certainly a place with atmosphere.
Luke, Castle Hill.
4WD
