Australian chefs abroad: Sam Lawrence on building Bridges in New York

From Melbourne kitchens to a Michelin star in New York, Sam Lawrence has spent years shaping a style that finally has a restaurant of its own

For Australian chef Sam Lawrence, opening Bridges was less about starting again than deciding what to keep.

By the time he opened the restaurant at Chatham Square in Manhattan’s Chinatown in September 2024, Sam had worked with Andrew McConnell in Melbourne, cooked alongside James Henry at Bones in Paris, spent time in Hong Kong and built a long career with Ignacio Mattos in New York.

He had progressed from chef de cuisine at Estela to culinary director across Mattos Hospitality, working across restaurants including Estela, Altro Paradiso and Lodi. Bridges gave him somewhere to bring those years together on his own terms.

Just under 14 months after opening, the restaurant received its first Michelin star. The recognition came quickly, but the cooking behind it had been built over years.

From Melbourne to Estela

Sam’s path started in Melbourne, working in Andrew McConnell’s restaurants before leaving Australia. Paris followed, where he joined fellow Australian James Henry at Bones, then time in Hong Kong before he eventually settled in New York.

Estela became the longest and arguably most formative stretch of that progression.

Sam has spoken about being drawn to the freedom in the cooking there. The restaurant was not rigidly tied to one cuisine or a fixed idea of how a dish should look. Technique mattered, but so did giving ingredients room to move in less expected directions.

“There was a freedom to that cooking,” Sam said after opening Bridges. “It was really exciting.”

As his role developed, so did the scope of the job. He moved from leading the kitchen at Estela into a culinary director position across Mattos Hospitality, taking him beyond the daily rhythm of one restaurant and into menu development and food operations across several businesses.

It also gave him years to work out what he wanted from a restaurant of his own.

Building Bridges

Sam left Mattos Hospitality in 2022 and spent the next two years developing Bridges with partners Nicolas Mouchel and Josey Stuart.

They did not rush the process. The three travelled through Europe together, visiting places Sam had repeatedly referenced while discussing the kind of restaurant they wanted to build. Those shared experiences became a way of creating a common language around the food, service and identity of Bridges before the doors opened.

That preparation extended to the team. Sam has credited the time spent planning, training and establishing how the restaurant should operate with helping Bridges feel more settled from its first services.

For a chef stepping out of an established restaurant group, there was also a different level of responsibility. The decisions were no longer contained to the kitchen. The food, team, financial risk and success of the restaurant now sat much closer together.

The same patience that went into opening Bridges can be seen in the food.

Finding his own cooking

The dish most closely associated with Bridges, a Comté tart, had been in development for much of the two years before the restaurant opened.

Its foundation is a shortcrust-style pastry made with malted barley, bringing a toasted flavour and softer texture. Inside sits a custard made with egg yolks and 24-month-aged Comté. Early versions were finished with chanterelles cooked with Vin Jaune, butter and anise hyssop, while the garnishes have continued to move with the seasons.

It is a useful way into Sam’s cooking. The technique is recognisable and grounded in classical foundations, but the final dish does not feel bound by them.

“The cooking definitely is based on traditional technique,” Sam has said.

At Bridges, that foundation is combined with the breadth of produce available in New York and the reference points Sam has gathered from different kitchens.

The grilled king crab is a good example. The shell is opened and the meat brushed with toasted chilli butter before the whole crab is cooked over coals, allowing the meat to warm and baste inside the shell. It is served with béarnaise sharpened with salted plum and pickled daikon, peppers and onion.

The duck takes a different route. After ageing and slow roasting, the breast is finished gradually over the grill to build smoke and crisp skin. The leg meat is turned into a sausage and wrapped in cabbage, bringing two treatments of the bird back together on the plate with potato purée and a sauce built around dried scallop and chilli.

There are French and Basque references throughout the menu, particularly in the sauces, preservation and handling of wine, but Sam has resisted putting Bridges into a single culinary category.

There are also smaller reminders of where he started. An early dessert of toasted meringue with coffee, lemon and fig-leaf oil drew directly on the Australian meringue desserts he grew up eating.

That combination of established technique and less predictable flavour is now central to Bridges. Michelin recognised the restaurant with one star in its 2025 New York selection, highlighting a menu that does not fit neatly within one cuisine.

For Sam, however, the more significant shift is having his own kitchen in which to develop it.

Years spent working for other chefs gave him a deep bank of references, but Bridges required him to decide which of those ideas belonged in his own restaurant and which did not. It is the difference between accumulating experience and turning that experience into a point of view.

Back in Melbourne

In March 2026, that journey came back to where much of it began.

Sam returned to Melbourne with the Bridges team for Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, cooking two nights at Cutler with former boss Andrew McConnell.

The menu was not simply a reproduction of what was being served in New York. Bridges’ cooking was worked around Melbourne’s early-autumn produce, with dishes including tomato broth with calamari and coriander seed, cured tuna with dates and leek, prawn toast with gooseberries and basil, and smoked eel with Tropea onions and cherry leaf.

The Comté tart travelled too, but arrived with tomatoes and elderberries. Later courses included coral trout with bisque, Swiss chard and Pernod, and grilled duck with boudin noir, beetroot and rhubarb.

A few days later, Sam cooked again at Gerald’s Bar, reconnecting with another part of his Melbourne years before returning to New York.

The Michelin star gives Sam Lawrence’s story an obvious headline, but Bridges is more interesting as the result of what came before it.

Melbourne, Paris, Hong Kong and New York all remain visible in the cooking, as do the chefs and restaurants Sam worked with along the way. What has changed is who makes the final decisions.

At Bridges, those years of reference points are no longer someone else’s menu or someone else’s restaurant. They have become Sam’s own.