The café at the Maritime Museum

HarbourWatch is the café inside the Australian National Maritime Museum precinct at Pyrmont, sitting where the museum grounds finish and the water starts. The building gives onto the harbour on one side and the museum on the other, so the room works as a lookout as much as a café, with the city across the water. It trades every day from 9.30am until 4pm: a morning and midday room, for coffee, breakfast and lunch.

The kitchen works to a short list. Breakfast opens it, lunch takes over in the middle of the day, and coffee runs from the moment the doors open until they close. The cooking is coastal and produce-led, made to sit comfortably alongside the museum, and it is built for the way people eat here: an hour at a table looking out, or a box and a cup carried onto the boardwalk. Drinks have a list of their own.

It takes a few different kinds of visit. People come either side of the galleries, walkers along the Darling Harbour foreshore stop for a coffee, and the occasional meeting that would rather have a view than a meeting room settles at a table for an hour. The room is open to the water and the outlook carries most of it, so nothing is rushed, and the day ends at 4pm. Takeaway covers the rest, and plenty of what the counter makes is eaten somewhere along the boardwalk.

The shape of the day is the same all week: 9.30am to 4pm, Monday to Sunday, breakfast and then lunch, with no evening service. Beyond the counter, the events side of the business works across the museum precinct, indoors and out, at sizes the café itself could not seat. Events have a team of their own, and a group table at the café is arranged by phone.