Daniel Puskas is the chef and owner of Sixpenny in Stanmore, awarded 3 hats in the Good Food Guide in 2026.
Sixpenny has now been operating for more than a decade, and that matters in itself. Opened in March 2012 in Stanmore, it has held its place by staying clear about what kind of restaurant it is: a small dining room, a tasting-menu format, and a kitchen built around close attention to produce, seasonality and progression across the meal.
For chefs, that is where the interest starts. Restaurants can change shape quickly once expectations build around them. Sixpenny has stayed committed to a model that depends on judgement, consistency and detail rather than scale or noise. That kind of longevity carries weight in professional kitchens.
early foundations
Daniel began his apprenticeship at Tetsuya’s in 2002. He later worked at Marque, and by 2007 he was leading the kitchen at Oscillate Wildly in Newtown. Those are useful markers because they place him in a line of Sydney kitchens known for strong technical standards and close attention to execution.
He was also recognised early through the Josephine Pignolet Young Chef award, which helped fund overseas experience, including time in the United States. That background helps explain why the food associated with Daniel has long carried both technical discipline and a willingness to refine ideas through travel and exposure rather than through showmanship.
opening sixpenny
Sixpenny was opened by Daniel Puskas and James Parry in 2012. From the outset, it was a small, focused restaurant rather than a broad-format operation, and its tasting-menu structure remains central to the way the kitchen presents its work.
That matters because a tasting-menu restaurant asks different things of a brigade. Sequencing matters more. Prep matters more. The relationship between one course and the next has to be deliberate. For chefs, Sixpenny is interesting not because the format is unusual, but because the kitchen has stayed committed to it over time and kept refining the details inside that structure.
what makes daniel different
The clearest thread through Daniel’s work is restraint. That is visible in the way Sixpenny describes its menu now, with an emphasis on local suppliers, seasonality and fermentation as part of the kitchen’s pantry and flavour base.
What stands out to chefs is that this is not restraint for style’s sake. When a kitchen works with a narrow frame and asks each element on the plate to carry weight, the demands on prep, seasoning and timing become sharper. That is one reason Daniel has held such respect across the industry, alongside formal recognition like Gourmet Traveller’s 2022 Chef of the Year.
the kitchen at sixpenny
Today, Sixpenny’s public profile describes a kitchen led by Daniel Puskas and Tony Schifilliti, working with local growers, producers and a progressional tasting-menu format. Fermentation is presented as a fundamental part of the menu, and the restaurant’s own language places quality over quantity at the centre of its approach.
For chefs, the useful lesson is not simply that the restaurant is polished. It is that the kitchen has built a system strong enough to keep a very specific style of restaurant operating at a high level over a long period. That is harder than novelty, and usually more revealing of standards.
recognition in 2026
By 2026, Sixpenny was still publicly being referred to as a three-hatted restaurant, and Daniel was being described by major food and event platforms as the owner of the three-hatted Sydney restaurant.
That matters because hats only carry meaning when the standard behind them is sustained. In Daniel’s case, the stronger point for chefs is not the accolade on its own, but what sits underneath it: a restaurant opened in 2012 that still appears to be working with patience, clarity and a strong sense of what belongs on the plate.
