Govinda's
Part restaurant, part cinema, this Darlinghurst Road institution has paired an all-you-can-eat vegetarian buffet with a film upstairs for decades, run under the city's Hare Krishna community. The nightly spread changes but reliably runs to dahl, a vegetable curry, baked pasta, pakoras, poppadums and a cooling cucumber raita, eaten at leisure before guests retire to the screening room's cushions and daybeds. It is meat-free throughout, generous rather than refined, and the ticket traditionally covers both dinner and the movie. Open Wednesday to Sunday evenings only, it draws a mix of first dates, students and long-time devotees. Little about the format has changed, which is precisely the appeal: few Sydney rooms offer this particular combination of unlimited vegetarian food and a horizontal cinema in one sitting.