Restaurateur Chris Lucas is bringing his glamorous Grill Americano and its white-jacketed waiters from Melbourne to Sydney after snapping up the entire ground floor of one of the harbour city’s mid-century gems, No. 1 Chifley Square.

“I fell in love with the building years ago when I was staying at the Wentworth Hotel next door,” Lucas says of the curved, aeronautical lines of the 1950s building, previously known as Qantas House and located on the corner of Elizabeth and Hunter streets. Its glass curtain will afford Grill Americano Sydney, which opens in September, massive street frontage.

Sydneysiders might say the Melbourne-based Lucas has more front than Mark Foy’s, elbowing into a precinct already overflowing with restaurants in a city not exactly short of grills.

Just last month, the team behind Bentley Bar + Restaurant added to the Sydney CBD grill tally with Eleven Barrack. The Grill at The International in Martin Place was recently awarded two hats by Good Food; Americano and Rockpool Bar & Grill will be next-door neighbours.

But Lucas already has skin in the Sydney restaurant game and experience dealing with tricky heritage buildings. In 2017, he slid Chin Chin into the historic Griffiths Teas building in Surry Hills. His design director wife, Sarah Lucas, will oversee the Sydney interiors, fresh from the launch of Maison Batard restaurant in the 1927 home of Melbourne’s Italian Society.

With the new Martin Place metro station entrance opposite Grill Americano, Lucas argues he’s landed at the heart of Sydney. Americano will also offer a different take on the traditional grill genre. “I didn’t want it to be too masculine,” he says of the original Melbourne brief, which Sydney will follow. “More than half our clientele [in Melbourne] are women. It’s not a blokey steakhouse.”

While Sydneysiders can still expect a big meat program, Grill Americano, as the name suggests, sits poised between the US and Italy. “I always admired those big New York brasserie grills,” says Lucas, “but I’ve also drawn a lot of inspiration from Harry’s Bar in Venice, with that almost mid-century style of food presentation and waiters in white jackets.”

Customers will be able to order a wagyu eye-fillet or bistecca alla pizzaiola (with pizza sauce), but Grill Americano’s wider brief will see signature dishes such as its spanner crab linguine aglio e olio journey north to Sydney.

“Sydney has a bigger kitchen, so we’re going to dial up our pasta section,” Lucas says. “It’ll have an oyster and crustacea bar, which we don’t have in Melbourne.” A wine program with 7000 to 8000 bottles will be created, much of it already cellared.

Lucas has been on the expansion trail recently, also adding Canberra restaurant Carlotta to his growing hospitality group late last year. He describes Melbourne, where the bulk of his restaurants are located, as “a Eurocentric city” and says Grill Americano Sydney will carry a little of that DNA. The dark blue colour palette will be transplanted, but the restaurant will embrace its adopted city.

“One of the things I love about Sydney, it’s got a positivity and energy about it,” Lucas says. “The area around there has some of Sydney’s best restaurants, office buildings, hotels and shopping. It’s the heart and soul of the city.”