The Good Food Guide, run by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has been around for almost 50 years, with its latest round of hats awarded at the annual Good Food Guide Awards last month at events in Sydney and Melbourne.
In that time, one restaurant group has risen to dominate Sydney dining in a way that very few global cities have seen: Merivale.
With the scale of the company and its aggressive expansion (90-odd venues across NSW and Victoria and counting) has also come a scale of scandal unmatched by its peers.