St Elmo Byron Bay: what the dining room and bar was, and why it closed

Modern Spanish, and more specifically the share-plates end of it. St Elmo Dining Room & Bar ran a tapas menu built for a table, not a couple, with a wine list longer than a room that size strictly needed, and a set of group and banquet menus for larger bookings.

The St Elmo restaurant Byron Bay locals remember was a share-plates room, not a fine-dining one. That distinction matters, because the guides that still list it tend to file it under upmarket dining, and anyone arriving with that expectation would have been surprised by how loud it was.

It sat on a corner, upstairs from the street, in a part of town that has since become considerably busier.

Two things about St Elmo Byron Bay tend to surprise people who only know it from a guide entry: the room was noisy by design, and the menu changed often enough that no single dish ever became the reason to go.

People still search for the menu, so here is what the kitchen was known for, taken from what the restaurant published while it was trading and described rather than reproduced. A closed restaurant’s menu is not a useful document: the prices are wrong, the dishes are unavailable, and reprinting it invites somebody to try to order from it.

The signature was Spanish white anchovies with char, which is the dish people still bring up. Beyond it the menu ran to tapas and share plates built for the middle of the table, and the dessert list kept a lime granita on it for years.

The wine list was the other thing. It was longer than a room that size needed and it leaned Spanish and Italian in a town that mostly poured Australian: Albariño and Cava from Spain, Fiano and Prosecco from Italy, alongside the expected Hunter and Margaret River bottles. Anyone who remembers St Elmo for the wine before the food is remembering it correctly.

For the same format today, tapas and share plates in Byron Bay lists the 8 kitchens working that way now.

The name is common enough that this page gets a lot of the wrong traffic, so to be plain about it. St Elmo Steak House in Indianapolis is a famous American steakhouse, still trading, no connection. People also search for a St Elmo in Melbourne; whatever that turns out to be, it is not this one. And St. Elmo’s Fire is a 1985 film and, before that, the name for the electrical glow sailors saw on a ship’s mast.

This page is about a Spanish share-plates restaurant that traded in Byron Bay, New South Wales, and closed in 2021. If you were after one of the others, none of them is here.

It closed in 2021, after almost ten years of trading. The reasons were never set out in detail publicly, and this page is not going to speculate about them.

What can be said is that St Elmo Byron Bay was, by the end, one of the longer-running kitchens in a town where a decade is a long time. Byron Bay lost several established rooms in the same period, and Harvest at Newrybar followed in December 2024 after seventeen years, reported by The Echo at the time.

Anyone searching for St Elmo Byron Bay today usually wants one of two things: to know whether it is still open, or to find out what to book instead. The first answer is no. The second is below.

There is no St Elmo restaurant Byron Bay can send you to any more, but the format it worked in is well covered. For Spanish and Mediterranean share plates, The Mez Club and Loft Byron Bay are the closest in spirit, and Casa Luna covers the Mediterranean end with a wine store attached. For a long table with a set menu, group and banquet bookings lists what is set up for it.

If you would rather start from the beginning, the register carries the month each entry was confirmed and currently runs to 67 places — 65 of them trading and 2 marked closed for good, of which this is one.