The Great Australian Restaurant, like The Great Australian Novel, is an elusive beast. Many have dreamt of creating it; few have come close.
On paper, Noma - a restaurant from the other side of the world, about to pop up in Sydney on Tuesday for a 10-week sellout season - seems an unlikely contender. Since when did a Danish chef-owner of a two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen, four times ranked No 1 on the World's 50 Best list, know about Australian cuisine? 
Since his long love affair with our native foods blossomed into a deep commitment, that's when. When Rene Redzepi and his team - of which four key members are Australian - launch the antipo-dean Noma at Barangaroo, it will represent the culmination of the chef's months-long travels around our wide brown land in search of indigenous ingredients worth telling the world about.
Or, if not the world, at least the 5400 diners lucky enough to nab a seat at the relocated restaurant for $485 a head plus wine.
Noma Sydney will be so different from the mothership, and yet in some ways fundamentally the same. Redzepi is, after all, the chef who made foraging famous, who dared to put reindeer moss on his menu back home, and who asked our chefs on a visit here some years ago why they weren't using the bush foods all around them.
So it's goodbye, then, to the likes of "New Danish potato and nettle", and hello to magpie geese, mutton birds, beach greens, snow crab, abalone, green ants, crocodile fat, pandanus leaves, wild Queensland cherries â€¦ the glories of Australia, unearthed by one of the world's most influential chefs, facilitated by a network of native foods suppliers and brought to you by a restaurant team abundant with Aussies, notably sous-chef Beau Clugston, restaurant manager James Spreadbury, chef Tamara Archer and assistant manager Katherine Bont.
Could it be that it has taken an outsider to make us see, for the first time, what Australian cuisine really looks like?And did we mention Noma Sydney opens on Australia Day?