At one time Pyrmont was a distinctly working class suburb incorporating industrial plants like sugar refineries and building material manufacturers. Over the last three decades (since most of the wharves were closed down to be replaced by a container facility at Port Botany) it has been gentrified with a vengeance, mostly via high density residences such as apartment block towers.

A 1 bedroom unit can easily set you back half a million, though you can get some for as "low" as the high $300Ks if the floor plan of a dog kennel takes your fancy. A two bedroom unit? Bargain basement, high $600Ks. And from thereon the sky is the limit such as an upper level 3 bedroom unit in Pirrama Rd (a couple of streets from here) which sold for $7.3 million recently.

Unlike Rhodes (see the image of 14 March 2010), I doubt that people move into these places if they're going to be under mortgage stress. If you're going to pay into 7 figures for a unit, you're going to have that sort of money to splash around. So it's not surprising that there's a range of boutique eateries around this area, everything from Thai to Indian to Persian to modern Australian to you name it, all catering to the "too time-poor and cash-rich to throw a steak on the grill" residents.

Not that it always works out; although the Japanese place next door is welcoming some new customers, sadly The Black Pepper, the "Lazy Afternoon Tapas Bar", was taken possession of by the mortgagee. It's a pity, because I always liked the décor there and although I'm not known for eating a lot of Mexican I would have liked to have given it a try. Maybe the fact that I never did contributed to its demise!

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Edit January 2024: Our Mexican friends did not have a long tenure here. In December 2007 this had been a place called Luxor's on Harris, a Mediterranean fusion place which had replaced another outfit called Hennessy's on Harris only a few months earlier in 2007. It therefore lasted at most about 2 years, since the For Lease sign was already up by November 2009.

By November 2013 the place had become a Chinese restaurant named Ni Hao, which was still around in March 2021 but was gone by November of that year. Whether it was a victim of the pandemic I have no idea, nor have I been able to determine what's there now.

I had originally written that the place next door was a "Thai" place; it was Japanese, not Thai. I've corrected that in the description. Specifically, it was Furusato Restaurant. It wouldn't last much longer either, since there were "For Lease" signs up by July 2014. However another Japanese restaurant did appear there by November 2016.

Truth be told, between the normal passage of time, and what happened between 2020 and 2022 I doubt that there are very many places in Harris Street that have not seen some level of ownership churn over the last 14 years.

Interestingly I did acquire a taste for Mexican food after I moved down south a year or two after this shot (to a place where there were a couple of decent Mexican restaurants), so that part of the description is also out of date.