Loose and Easy in the Streets of Sydney

Outside a neighborhood joint here called the Rose Hotel, there’s a sign that declares, “No dogs.”

Inside, there’s an open-air patio, a funky bar serving ice-cold beer, and a super little kitchen dishing up hot chili prawns. And, wandering around, a sweet-tempered brownish mutt happily wagging a short tail.

“Sydney goes by itself, loose and easy, without any bossing,” goes the saying, which comes from the English writer D.H. Lawrence, who made his way down here in 1922.

Much has changed and the city is more international, but Sydney is still loose and easy, a big city with great weather, solid neighborhoods and beautiful beaches. This is a town with a distinctive, comfortable style all its own--a mix of this and that from Britain, America (and particularly coastal California), Asia and, of course, the wide and diverse continent that is Australia.

Listen to a street musician on one corner playing the bagpipes. Across the way hear the didgeridoo, an aboriginal instrument. Chinese newspapers, Lebanese restaurants and Greek Orthodox churches are as much a part of this city of more than 4 million people as the old English traditions. The city also is home to one of the largest and proudest gay cultural centers in the world.

Sydney is to Australia what New York once was for the States--the center of fashion, design, fine food and trends. “The big smoke,” they say, meaning the undisputed big city. (Though those in Melbourne beg to differ.)

Much of Sydney style is defined by water and weather. At Bondi Beach (pronounced BOND-eye), 15 minutes from downtown, the waves are steady, the water turquoise and the bikinied scenery memorable. “Oh, yeah--plenty of optics,” says 25-year-old Stephen Rainford, a Bondi surf regular.

The weather is mild. Consequently, sport--not “sports,” is the thing, for men and women. “When I first got here, I worked at a women’s magazine where everyone would go to the gym every day,” said Maggie Alderson, a British fashion journalist who came to Sydney seven years ago. Now a style maven at the Sydney Morning Herald, she said, “Coming from London, this was quite a shock; we’d go to lunch and talk about the gym.”

Fitness plays a key role in Sydney fashion, she said: “It’s about having a great natural body, not plastic surgery. It’s about a body that’s been worked out its whole life.”

Sydney is “very proud,” of its fashion industry, she said, noting that leading designers Collette Dinnigan, Akira Isogawa and Peter Morrissey are among many Australian lines now sold in the United States. Dinnigan’s work leans to the feminine and romantic, Isogawa does “refined avant-garde” and Morrissey--well, his stuff is “pure Australian body-conscious raunch.”

Morrissey is one of three designers commissioned to design a range of costume pieces for a segment dedicated to Olympic fashion in Friday’s opening ceremony. The locals can hardly wait.

The stores are full of halters and little tank tops in pastel pinks and blues for summer--spring begins next week--and Alderson said, “They really know how to dress for summer here. You stay cool but look reasonably smart.”

With a confidential air, she added, “Exposed armpits are a big part of it.” For the moment, so too are manicures--very in. And straight hair. Curly, at least right now, is “very declasse,” she said.

The thoroughly hip Sydney dude wearing a fine-looking suit (no tie, please) sets it off with sandals like the slip-on kind you might wear in L.A. to the pool. Socks are a no-no. “It looks good, actually,” Alderson said.

At the beach, it’s de rigueur for any male to wear those teeny-tiny Speedo-style bathing suits.

And colored socks with sneakers are OK, not just white. Shoes themselves are decidedly optional, at least when prowling one’s neighborhood.

Bare feet will not, however, get you into most pubs, much less one of the in places to be on a Friday after work--the Slip Inn, near Darling Harbor. It’s a three-level joint: on top, a pub; underneath, a bar with a DJ spinning techno-beat tunes; underneath that, a disco dubbed the “Chinese Laundry.”

Outside, the Sydney bus stops are decorated with oversize photos of a magazine cover featuring Britney Spears in a blue bikini. Inside the second-level bar, the DJ, who goes by the moniker “N-Zed,” declares the place a no-Britney zone: “You couldn’t pay me enough.”

If that’s the Friday night action, weekends are for being out in the Southern California-like weather, typically at the water. The Tasman Sea rolls up from the east at beaches such as Bondi and Manly.

And then there’s glorious Sydney Harbor. As Bill Bryson points out in his new book, “In a Sunburned Country,” it’s not “so much a harbor as a fjord, 16 miles long and perfectly proportioned--big enough for grandeur, small enough to have a neighborly air.”

The angle-roofed Opera House is on the harbor. The Harbor Bridge spans the harbor. Sydney is world famous for these two architectural landmarks. The Opera House was designed by Danish architect Jorn Utzon, who walked off the site in 1966 after intractable arguments with the state government and has refused to even visit Sydney to see it. It opened in 1973.

Circular Quay (pronounced kee), where clean, punctual and cheery-looking green-and-yellow ferries drop off commuters, is between the bridge and the Opera House. “Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at 8:30 on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney,” writes Bryson. “To begin with, it presents one of the world’s great views.”

Behind the Opera House, Sydney is built up, dominated like other modern cities by high-rises downtown. Walking the neighborhoods is the treat--row upon row of solid brick homes, many with elaborate lace ironwork gracing the terraces.

The latest architectural addition to Sydney is Olympic Park, built for the Games on the site of a former waste dump and slaughterhouse at the western suburb of Homebush Bay, nine miles west of downtown.

Fourteen of the 28 sports venues are located at the park. Stadium Australia seats 110,000; curved, white triangular arches on either side of the roof arrest the eye; below it’s so big there’s room inside for four 747s.

Perhaps most impressive is the paved open space that runs the length of the park, more than a mile, creating an enormous plaza that can hold up to 300,000 people. On either side are solar-powered light towers and the venues themselves.

Aside from these last few days, with the Games on everyone’s mind, the talk around town is inevitably of real estate. Sydney has one of the highest rates of ownership in the world--38% of homes are wholly owned, 25% are being paid off and 28% are being rented. “Real estate is the topic on everyone’s mind,” said Michael Rolnick, a 30-year-old from Atlanta who has been here for two years as a manager for an Australian airline.

In Paddington, an eastern Sydney neighborhood, you can get a two-bedroom Victorian for about $400,000, according to John McGrath, chief executive of McGrath Estate Agents, Australia’s largest residential real estate company.

A harbor-front luxury apartment in a “prestige building” with a couple parking spaces? Prices start at $2.5 million. On the east side of Circular Quay, site of the most expensive real estate on the continent, a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment will set you back about $600,000, McGrath said.

When not spending their Saturdays visiting properties they can’t afford, Sydneysiders are otherwise apt to be bad mouthing someone or something--politicians, business people, entertainers or anyone with even a smidgen of authority.

The Sunday Telegraph runs a regular feature titled “Guess Who Don’t Sue,” containing half a dozen nuggets about the foibles of the Sydney tribe--each unnamed, unsourced and unattributed, the better to keep libel judgments away.

A sample from this last week: “Which charity’s representative was caught out making a racist remark at a black-tie event this week? Shame! Shame! Shame!”

There are, of course, other oft-repeated coffeehouse threads:

What to do about the original human inhabitants of the place? Is China the Far East--or the Near North? How is it the Queen of England is still the head of state?

Conversation is sure to be interrupted by the ring of a cellular phone. In Sydney they’re called “mobiles.” Everyone’s got one, and the preferred accessory is that little ear bud that allows hands-free conversation--or, better yet, access to a latte while chatting.

The coffeehouses are everywhere. On one long block of Victoria Street in the eastern precinct called Darlinghurst, there are seven. No Starbucks there--but there is one a few minutes away, near downtown.

Some vestiges of American culture are so evident as to make one forget California is a 14-hour plane ride away. Currently playing at a variety of Sydney megaplexes? The likes of “Road Trip,” “Scary Movie” and “Big Momma’s House.” On a single block of George Street, one of Sydney’s main drags, you can find Planet Hollywood, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and a Burger King-look-a-like called Hungry Jack’s. Radio stations blare ads for Blockbuster and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

However, it’s at the real restaurants--not the fast-food joints--that an original Sydney style is most evident. Not just at Edna’s Table, which serves kangaroo (very red and gamy, heavy like venison), crocodile (like chewy chicken) and emu (excellent as a tartare). But also at Bills in Darlinghurst, where hardly anything is refrigerated because produce arrives from the farms and goes right onto the plate.

A popular breakfast choice: fresh corn fritters with spinach, tomato and bacon. The tomato comes from Queensland, the northeastern state; the spinach from a farm outside Sydney; the bacon from a local producer.

“There’s nothing nicer than fresh food,” said art student-turned-waiter-turned-chef Bill Granger, who has two other restaurants and a new book--”Sydney Food”--on the shelves. “It doesn’t have to be complicated as long as it is freshly assembled.”

At Tetsuya’s, perhaps the epicenter of the Australian epicurean scene, the menu changes daily depending on what’s fresh. It takes months to get a reservation. At the end of the wait: a 12-course prix fixe menu, about $90, featuring delicacies such as Tasmanian ocean trout, a delicate pink-fleshed fish prepared with salted kelp on top and served on a plain white plate lined with parsley oil, capers and trout roe.

If you really like the meal or the service, by the way, you tip about 10%. Otherwise, 5%.

As for the taxi ride afterward, if the fare is 10 cents over the nearest dollar, it’s not uncommon for the driver to tip you by rounding the fare down.

Loose and easy. No bossing. No place else like it.