Rick Stein's 7 favourite restaurants worldwide, including two in country Australia

Celebrity chef, Rick Stein, has opened his eponymous restaurant on Sydney's Coogee Beach. "I really like Coogee - it's a great spot, informal and comfortable," Stein told Explore. "My new restaurant is right on the beach. It's part casual, with outdoor areas as many people will be just coming off the beach. But there's also a formal area for considered dining." As always, seafood is the star of Stein's menu, with "a lot of prawn and scallop dishes for entrees, and substantial main courses like whole grilled snapper". While the Coogee restaurant is a great option for visitors to Sydney this summer, here are Stein's seven other favourite eateries around the globe.

1. Maxwell Food Centre, Singapore: Chicken rice is one of my favourite Asian dishes, which is basically just chicken poached in stock, and sliced and served with rice. But the great thing about it is it has a sauce made with fermented black beans, garlic, ginger, a little bit of sugar, chilli and soy sauce. And it's the black beans at the back of it that really give it its unique flavour. There many places in this hawker centre [in Singapore] that do it, but there's one that Anthony Bourdain has mentioned as one of his favourite places to have chicken rice. There's a little plaque that mentions that.

2. Riley's Fish Shack, Tynemouth, UK: This is a little shack on the beach made up of two shipping containers in Tynemouth, right up in the north-east of England. You have to go down a steep path to get to it, but when you get there, it's just sensational local seafood. I particularly remember one of the dishes there was a crab souffle with thermidor sauce. It's very visual, because you're there right on the beach, and everything is rugged, and everything is made up of driftwood. It's just got this funkiness about it, which is quite special.

3. Beachwood Cafe, Yamba, NSW: It's a restaurant run by a Turkish lady, which features a lot of Turkish cooking. I remember having Turkish sardines and a side order of broad bean salad. I really enjoyed that. It just seems to me the right sort of food for a beachside place like Yamba.

4. La Colombe d'Or, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France: Saint-Paul-de-Vence is a little village very close to Nice. The reason I like La Colombe d'Or is because it's all about classic French cooking. The menu was hand-painted in the '60s by a local artist and it hasn't changed since. So all they do now is put the price in pencil as it changes over the years. And you get very simple things like melon with parma ham and a lovely local seabass dish with sauce mousseline, which is hollandaise sauce with whipped cream folded through it. They do the most fantastic chicken fricassee with morels. It's all the sort of food that I used to eat in my youth and still want to eat now.

5. Akiko's Sushi Bar, San Francisco: The reason I like this place is because it's tiny, like many good sushi bars, particularly in Japan. It's only got seats for 15-20 people. A Japanese couple runs it - it's very small, very, very special. I just like it for its lack of pretension and for the excellence of its fish.

6. Stegna Kozas, Rhodes, Greece: This fish restaurant on the island of Rhodes features very local fish, particularly good there is the octopus and the fish stew that they do there. And I remember when the fish stew arrived, the guy that runs the restaurant said to me what you need in this fish stew is loads of sea salt and loads of olive oil, so I piled this fish stew with sea salt and lots and lots of olive oil, and it was just sensational because the fish was just so fresh.

7. The Niagara Cafe, Gundagai, NSW: I have been doing a series in NSW called Rick Stein's Australia and we had to go to what used to be called a milk bar in Gundagai. It was started in the '40s by a great family. And at the time, milk bars that served great local hamburgers and milkshakes, they all had to have American names to make them sound posh, funky and trendy, so that's why this place is called The Niagara after the Niagara falls. The reason I loved it is because it's been lovingly restored to its art deco originals, so it's beautiful to look at. And they do the burger they would have started doing in those days. When I first came to Australia in the '60s, the thing I remember most of all were the Aussie burgers, quite unlike you get anywhere in the States - I mean with a really great beef patty, with cheese, bacon, often with egg, and tomato and beetroot. So really, really big filling, with chips and lovely milkshakes. I'm particularly fond of the chocolate molten milkshake, which they still do at the Niagara Cafe.