David Meagher on 60 years of Gourmet Traveller, AI-proof and preparing for the biggest party of the year

When someone floated Olympus Dining for this year's Gourmet Traveller Restaurant of the Year Awards, David Meagher went and looked, walked the room, and came away sold.

"We went and had a look, and we planned it all out, and it just seemed perfect," the Gourmet Traveller editor told Mediaweek - even though his first instinct, faced with a 160-guest brief, had been to wonder whether a restaurant "kind of in the round" could pull it off.

It's the kind of small, practical puzzle that sits behind every big anniversary. On Monday, Gourmet Traveller will hold its 2026 Restaurant of the Year Awards at Olympus Dining in Sydney, bringing together more than 160 chefs, restaurateurs and hospitality figures - and marking 60 years of the Are Media-owned title alongside more than four decades of the awards themselves.

The venue choice wasn't only about capacity. 

"They won an award last year for best new talent, and that was another thing we wanted to do - have a synergy between awards from year to year," Meagher said, of Olympus chef Ozge Kalvo, who took out Best New Talent at the 2025 awards and is curating this year's event menu.

Returning sponsors and major prizes

Presented by Lexus Australia, the 2026 program spans six finalist categories: Best New Talent, Best New Restaurant, Best Destination Dining, Restaurant Personality of the Year, Bar of the Year and the Readers' Choice Icon Award - plus the peer-voted Chef of the Year and Outstanding Contribution to Hospitality awards, and the night's major prize, Restaurant of the Year.

Scanpan, Wedgwood, Porkstar, S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy, 1800 Tequila, Yalumba and Maison Pompadour round out the supporting sponsors.

The timing lands roughly a year into Meagher's tenure, and he's been careful about how much he's touched. 

"The magazine is 60 years old this year, so it's been going for a very long time. And I was very conscious of making massive changes to a magazine that has a very dedicated and rusted-on audience; you make changes to a publication like that kind of at your peril, in a way."

One deliberate shift: more recipes. 

"We slightly increased the amount of recipe content that we have each month, in acknowledgement that that's what readers buy the print magazine for." 

A deliberate non-shift: travel. 

"We didn't really want to be in the business of planning travel itineraries. What we were trying to do is bring an experienced writer's perspective on a destination, something that people can't get easily from an AI app."

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That distinction - what a person can offer that a chatbot can't - runs through how Meagher talks about the masthead's longevity. 

"You all meet readers who tell us that they've kept every issue from the last 10, 20 years. They trust us, and they trust the advice that we give, particularly in food content." 

Part of that trust is expensive to maintain: "We triple-test recipes, which is a big expense for us, but it means that if you go to the time and the expense of cooking a recipe that's in the magazine, you can be fairly certain that we've made sure that it's going to work."

Restaurant recommendations get the same scrutiny, he said, even as the pace of openings makes the job harder. 

"There's a new restaurant opening every other day, right? We have to know what's going on, as does every other site that's covering food and restaurants." 

Gourmet Traveller's reviewers - based in every state - go in independently and pay their own way. "We are very conscious that if we recommend - there's 100 restaurants in there - that we have been to them, that they are value for money, that they are what they say they are."

That trust appears to be paying off: Gourmet Traveller readership is up 43% year-on-year, according to Roy Morgan Single Source data. Profiles of this year's award winners will run in the September issue, on sale 24/08/2026, alongside the annual Restaurant Guide and Australia's top 100 restaurants list.

Sixty years in, Meagher's real anniversary gift to the magazine might be the smallest one: not touching what already works.