Lago Cucina, above the Budgewoi Hotel

The Budgewoi Hotel is a pub by the lake, and Lago Cucina is the restaurant that sits on its first floor. You come in through the hotel and take the central staircase; at the top the fittings change and the water is there in the windows. It is relaxed rather than formal, a step up from the bar below, with the unhurried pace of the Central Coast.

The kitchen is Italian and makes its pasta by hand, which is what most people climb the stairs for. The cooking is generous and the flavours are bold, and the bar works to the same brief, mixing off the Italian coast. Weekend lunch can be booked as a bottomless sitting: two hours, a banquet to share, house white, red, sparkling and beer poured throughout, $79 a head for a table of at least four, with a $40 upgrade for a cocktail afternoon.

The room takes a table of two as readily as a party of twenty, and the Cellar, a semi-private corner of the dining room, covers what sits in between. Lunch belongs to the weekend and is the unhurried service, ending mid-afternoon; dinner sittings begin on Thursday, and Sunday finishes earliest of the four nights. Groups from 12 move onto a set banquet, and past 30 the events team takes the booking on. At full stretch the floor holds 150 for a party on its feet.