You can understand a certain frustration from the locals when the average British visitor thinks that the best dining experience to be had in Sydney is Doyles fish and chip restaurant on the beach at Watson's Bay.

There is nothing wrong with Doyles, which serves perfectly decent battered fish and good chips. There is a nice cold lobster or mud-crab salad if you fancy something a bit smarter and some good Australian whites. But after all the improvements in the dining scene in the past 25 years, it's a little galling to be judged by what is really a chippy.

The location helps enormously, though - you can dip your toes in the Pacific Ocean with the fabulous skyscraper backdrop of the central business district with, naturally, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge thrown in for good measure. So euphoric was I with the location when I first got there in the mid-1980s that noticing a British celebrity, Mel Smith, at a nearby table, I uncharacteristically bounded over and exclaimed that I had been at Oxford University at the same time as him.

“Sorry, mate, don't know who you are,” he said.

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I was much embarrassed, but know now how hard it is to remember everybody if you're constantly meeting people. I mentioned it to him when I met him some time later - he said he had just got off the plane and was so jet-lagged that he wouldn't have recognised his own mother.

Ask me now where is best for seafood on the water and I would say Icebergs in Bondi and Pier at Rose Bay. A couple of years ago, a lunch at Icebergs provided me with a moment of complete pleasure - you know those times when just for an instant you see it all.

The restaurant is Italian, and the food mostly seafood. It's a beautiful, simple restaurant with glass and light wood everywhere, all the paintwork is in the aqua shades, there are informal wicker armchairs to sit in and a view across the most famous beach in Australia.

The restaurant is on the northern side of the crescent-shaped beach, so you are actually across the water, behind the breaking surf. You order maybe some crab with chilli and soft polenta or some harbour prawns caught that morning dipped in flour and deep fried for a moment. Everything in the restaurant - location, interior, food - comes together: this is Australia.

Pier is the other restaurant to which I always return. Like Icebergs, its location is the last word in dining on the water. It is built on a pier at Rose Bay, and wherever you sit the reflection off the water is all around you. White tablecloths and chairs with blue glass everywhere. All you need is a glass of crisp riesling such as Geoffrey Grosset's Polish Hill and you are ready for some great fish.

There is no meat on the menu, simply the best fish and shellfish that the owner and chef, Greg Doyles, can get his hands on. No chef I know pays more attention to the detail of buying fish. The result is a menu that tries to deliver the freshest, simplest tastes.

I ate there last Wednesday and had the best carpaccio of fish outside Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo: reassuringly thick cuts of Tasmanian salmon loin and some thinner, long slices of the fattier belly, so loved by the Japanese. There were thick slices of tailer and kingfish - two other fish with a high oil content.

Being completely won over by the freshness, I also ordered a carpaccio of trumpeter fish with a tomato and lime water vinaigrette and a main course of Murray cod, which has a delicate fattiness that only the best freshwater fish can deliver. Pier is expensive, but worth every penny.

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