Gluten Free Restaurants and Cafes in Sydney

I've been tracking gluten free restaurants in Sydney for years and the list on my phone is now so long I thought I may as well publish it online. 

A Rainbow Lorikeet (by Sardaka)

Sydney, Inner City

Wholegreen Bakery Cafe (Australian)

257 Clarence Street, Sydney 
Mon-Sat: 8am-3pm; Sun: closed (totally GF)

The Rocks Cafe (Australian)

99 George St, The Rocks

Mon-Sat: 7.30am-9pm; Sun: 7.30am-5pm

Loftus Lane Cafe (Australian)

Shop 3, 38-42 Bridge St, Circular Quay

Mon-Fri: 6.30am-3pm; Sat-Sun: 8am-3pm

Eastbank Cafe (Australian)

61-69 Macquarie St, Circular Quay

Mon-Sun: 11am until late

Opera Bar (Australian)

Sydney Opera House, Lower Concourse, Sydney

Sun-Thurs: 11am-12am; Fri-Sat: 11am-12.30am

My Christian Larp

A sculpture outside St James' King Street, Sydney

In 2024 I developed an interest in Christianity (which I wrote about here). I read the Gospels three times. I read the rest of the New Testament once. I listened to a bunch of podcasts. I studied a bunch of websites. I read a couple of books. I bought some icons (of St Mary and St Olga) and tried praying in front of them. By 2025, after visiting a bunch of Orthodox churches and finding each of them focused strongly on specific cultural groups (Russian, Greek, Assyrian, etc), I developed the view that I should look into Anglo-Catholicism, which is a movement within the Anglican communion which emphasises a return to catholic practices and theology sans the Pope. The main draw card was ethno-cultural. It seemed to me that most churches revolve around ethnic identity so Anglicanism looked like a good fit. The experiment didn’t go well and perhaps I really should have known better, not least because when my interest in Anglo-Catholicism started I had a highly unusual dream wherein the Virgin Mary spoke to me and she said just one thing: “the Anglican church is a desert”.

Visiting Anglo-Catholic Churches in Sydney

Sydney has half a dozen or so churches that align with Anglo-Catholicism (at least that is my understanding). I visited most of them and my experiences were as follows:

The Logos According to the Gospels

A page from a medieval Bible: Johnbod

Until not long ago I thought I knew Christianity and had thoughtfully rejected it, then my podcast addiction led me to bump into information that suggested I knew nothing but shadows on a wall when it came to this important and complex religion. Because I regard myself as a truth seeker, and truly open-minded, for some months now I have been trying to unlearn my prior suppositions and learn what this religion actually is. An obvious starting point is the Gospels. I have relied on two translations, one is the New King James Version (NKJV) and the other is the Eastern Orthodox Bible (EOB). They are each translated from slightly different original manuscripts – the NKJV mostly derives from Greek manuscripts that were available in north-western Europe in the early 16th century, whereas the EOB is translated from different Greek manuscripts held in libraries in south-eastern Europe. In this post all of the quotes are from the text of the EOB.

The transitory world of men versus eternal life

A prominent theme in the Gospels is the juxtaposition between the everchanging worldly realm of men, of which death is an aspect, and that of God’s (Matt 16:23), which is associated with eternal life. The earthly realm is transitory (Luke 21:33), full of many distractions that are both pleasurable and unpleasurable (Luke 21:34), and it contains much evil (John 7:7). Whereas the realm of God has “many mansions” (John 14:2) but it “is not of this world” (John 18:36), even though it “is within you”, but it cannot be seen (Luke 17:21). Jesus explains (after exorcising a man) that it “is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28), which suggests the kingdom is a state of being that can be experienced in this life. This experience starts as something small (like a mustard seed) but if the seed grows within the fertile soil of a human heart it (allegorically) “becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air can come and find shelter in its branches” (Matt 13:32).

Note that “kingdom of God” is not a literal translation from the original Greek. According to the EOB a more literal translation is “rule of God”, “ruling power of God” or “reign of God” (at xvi). This connotes an experience of God’s power, whereas “kingdom” is more suggestive of a physical place that is elsewhere.

Ancient Roman Christians

Christian beliefs and practices in the 2nd and 3rd centuries

Icon of Mary, Rome (6th century or earlier)
Image source: Asia

Given that I have a good understanding of the religious landscape in ancient Rome it seems fitting to look at Christianity during this era. Many contemporary analyses of this kind focuses heavily on the New Testament, with a particular focus on 1st century Christians. As there is nothing I can add to the discussion on 1st century Christians I am instead starting in the 2nd century, with a focus on this nascent religion as it was before it became a major political force in the 4th century CE.

“Within a short time after Christ’s death [certainly by the 2nd century], Christianity became identified as a cult quite separate and distinct from Judaism. Non-Jewish converts often brought to the new cult ideas and rhetoric from their former religions or philosophies [especially Stoicism and Neo-Platonism] … Christianity … was a cult that attracted large numbers of lower-class people and encouraged them to participate in … emotionalism ... [and] private assembly ... [Shelton at 407-409]”

In the early 2nd century a Roman governor wrote to Trajan (ruled 98-117 CE) about the measures he was taking in relation to adherents of the new religion:

Protestant Christianity Versus Christianity

Destruction of "Idols" by Protestants (1524)

I have found myself in an awkward spiritual spot. Years ago I thoughtfully rejected Christianity – I even wrote a blogpost in 2013 about my reasons why. But lately a trinity of events have occurred such that I feel compelled to reconsider my position.

First, a good friend persuaded me to look at a particular window at St Mary’s Cathedral (Sydney) for the aesthetics. It showed Mary on a crescent moon with a halo of stars. It was beautiful and as I looked at it I had a strange sense of a medieval and mystical version of Christianity, and a thought “what a shame this type of Christianity no longer exists”.

Second, my approach to religion subtly shifted over a period of many months until I arrived at a position where I was starting to think maybe God exists in some great cosmic sense, and that the Gohonzon (the sacred mandala of Nichiren Buddhism, which I have been venerating for a number of years) is a portrait of God, and that (at least some of) the benevolent Gods might be God’s helpers.

Third, I listened to a podcast on Martin Luther and had a thunderstruck moment when I realised that the religion I had so thoughtfully rejected a long time ago was perhaps not Christianity but something rather more specific – Protestant Christianity, which is quite honestly just the predominant Germanic take on Christianity from the early modern period onwards. In my mind Protestantism was Christianity and vice versa, simply because I didn’t know any other type. The Christianity I thought I knew was rather uninteresting and uninspiring so it never occurred to me to explore any variations of it. Nearly 500 years of Protestant ancestry had taught me to look somewhat askance at Roman Catholicism, thus I tended to avoid it. My very limited encounters with Orthodox Christianity suggested it was a religion inextricably tied up with ethnic and cultural identities that had nothing to do with me, so I never thought about it, other than to admire the aesthetic. I did not even know there was a church further to the east than Lebanon until a few months ago, such was my general disinterest in Christianity.

The notions I had thought were synonymous with Christianity but are actually features of Protestantism (mostly inspired by Martin Luther and then John Calvin) include:

Northern European Food Curse – Salicylate Sensitivity

"Kitchen Scene" by van Rijck (17th century)

There is a well-known trope about British people having the runs after a night eating curry. One of the reasons for this, at least for some, is salicylate sensitivity – a heritable food intolerance that many people know nothing about, though it is estimated to affect perhaps around 2.5% of Europeans. An allergy specialist I saw years ago described the phenomenon as “edge of the world syndrome”, she told me that on some days every person in her waiting room with food sensitivities was red-haired, and explained that many people with northern European ancestry are today eating a diet that is utterly alien to that of their ancestors. Basically, northern Europeans adapted to eating a diet that was, for the most part, naturally low in salicylates. In so doing some of them lost the ability to efficiently metabolise the higher amounts of salicylates naturally found in the skin of most fruit, herbs and spices (as well as many vegetables) found further south on the globe – foods that are becoming increasingly common in modern Western diets. Today, many people put up with the symptoms of salicylate sensitivity because the symptoms are either mild enough to ignore or because they don’t understand the root cause of troubling health issues. 

The Hyperboreans and Their Connection with Apollo

Apple Tree in Blossom by Larsson (before 1919)

In the 5th century BCE Herodotus wrote of the Hyperboreans, a word which literally means “over Boreas”. Boreas is the Hellenic God of the north wind, sometimes conceived of as living in Thrace, which is more or less the land we now call Bulgaria. Herodotus described the Hyperboreans thus:

“A man of Proconnesus [a Greek town in modern day NW Turkey], one Aristeas … came to the Issedones [ancient people who lived in central Asia] and, being inspired by Apollo, wrote a poem in which he declared that above the Issedones there lived a tribe of Arimaspians, being men with one eye, and, above these, the griffins [birds sacred to Apollo] that guard the gold, and, above these, the Hyperboreans, whose land reaches to the sea. All of these people, beginning with the Arimaspians and excepting only the Hyperboreans, continually make war upon their neighbours. The Issedones, say Aristeas, were thrust out of their lands by the Arimaspians, the Scythians [ancient people who lived in and around Crimea] by the Issedones, and the Cimmerians [ancient people who lived north of the Caucasus], living by the southern sea, being hard pressed by the Scythians, also left their country …

Demons in Buddhism

Demon Priest by Tawanabe Kyosai (1864)

I have been a little obsessed with demons for a while now, mostly in terms of wanting to understand their fundamental nature. I strongly suspect that many of the deities we call demons are actually deities of rival pantheons, and the process of “demonisation” is designed to strengthen the legitimacy of one religion over another. It may even be that some neglected deities become wrathful and seemingly demonic (while others leave desecrated locations or just lose interest in humans). I tend towards believing in voluminous polytheism, by which I mean there are many types of deities, and some of them really are demonic, as conventionally understood.

I recently watched a horror movie called “Incantation” (original title: “Zhou”) – I didn’t enjoy it but was genuinely spun out by it afterwards and thought about it for weeks. The effectiveness of the film was that it used Buddhist themes and turned them upside down, so that instead of Buddhist practice and iconography being benevolent (which is what I have associated with Buddhism my whole life – I was raised as a Buddhist) it delved into the world of curses and demonology. When I sat before the Mandala on my shrine to do some chanting I was reminded that demons are depicted on it – in particular Mara, Hariti and the Ten Demon Daughters. The reason for this is that the Mandala represents the universe in its entirety. I have also heard it said that the Mandala I pray before (called the Gohonzon) is a mirror – and a mirror does not show you only the things you want to see, but everything in you, including the potentiality to become demonic.

Venus and the Path

"Choosing the Rose" by Portaels (1860s)

Any spiritual tradition that venerates motherhood is operating in accord with the regenerative aspect of nature. When we look at the most prominent Gods of ancient Rome we see what aspects of nature they revered most: Venus and Mars – thus love, fertility and virility (Mars is not only a God of war but also agriculture). To get these very fundamental things right is to light the path to success, though it’s clearly a path on which many descendants of Europa have lost their way. It is not so much that we are not sexually active but that too few of us are in long term relationships.* This not ideal, as a tale from Ovid’s Metamorphoses demonstrates:

“The Propoetides – fools who denied Venus divinity – she stripped off their good names and their undergarments, and made them whores. As those women hardened .... their features hardened like their hearts. Soon they shrank to the ... heartless, treacherous hardness of sharp shards of flint.