Best restaurants in regional Victoria worth a roadtrip
From Paynesville to Pt Leo, Ballarat to Birregurra, incredible food at these delicious destinations are worth clocking up the kilometres to support regional Victoria in the wake of the bushfires.
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Regional Victoria is hurting after the bushfires and needs your help. A great way to support communities directly impacted as well as towns across the state is by taking a road trip – because Regional Victoria remains open for business. This week heraldsun.com.au celebrates the fantastic places to eat, camp and even take the dog for a hike around our great state. These specials are free for all to read. To support our newsroom and local journalism, subscribe to the Herald Sun.
From Paynesville to Pt Leo, Ballarat to Birregurra, the delectable offerings at these foodie favourites around regional Victoria are all worth clocking up the kilometres.
These are some of the best restaurants to visit and help regional Victoria bounce back from the fallout of the devastating bushfires.
OAKRIDGE
With a glorious vista across the vines that create its multi-award-winning wines, Oakridge has firmly established itself as one of the Yarra Valley’s favourite spots to lunch — and lunch long.
A clever take on the classic prawn toast sees the crustacean swapped for croc, a punchy XO adding unmistakeable heat, while a bouquet of fresh greens from the garden attends a roasted chicken wing stuffed with fermented rice and crunchy Jerusalem artichoke.
PT LEO ESTATE
Spend any time at Pt Leo Estate and you’ll soon be checking the local real estate pages. Any excuse to hasten a return visit to this Mornington Peninsula show pony.
Bold flavours and local ingredients rule, whether in the apples baked into the sourdough, fried mussel mini sandwiches, or Dory fillets in deeply delicious XO mushroom sauce and kipfler potatoes licked with beef fat.
BRAE
Eating with your fingers is a primal pleasure at the best of times, but there’s something perfectly perverse about doing so at one of the best restaurants in Australia.
Memorable moments abound, whether a crisp Jerusalem artichoke shell filled with Southern rock lobster, sublime abalone with pork jowl skewered over coals, or the simple pleasure of a patch of garden herbs and flowers dressed with sharp Shaw River pecorino.
A knockout beetroot tartare topped with mirin-soaked brook trout roe is a one-bite burst of wonder
WICKENS AT ROYAL MAIL
Some things never get old. And the view from Wickens, the signature restaurant at Dunkeld’s Royal Mail Hotel, is as timeless as it is spectacular.
It’s hard to fault, for instance, a plate of estate-farmed lamb, the perfectly treated meat simply served with carrot in puree and pickled form. Or a tranche of aged Great Ocean duck served with torched fresh figs or, indeed, just-set hapuka with sweet spaghetti squash and a fried oyster for crunch. It’s cooking at once clever and accessible.
FULL WICKENS AT ROYAL MAIL REVIEW
LAKE HOUSE
This refined restaurant and retreat might be well into its fourth decade but Lake House is as relevant as ever, rarely missing a beat under founder and culinary director Alla Wolf-Tasker and her phalanx of honed wait staff.
Menus still sway with the seasons, with the lion’s share of produce now supplied by the restaurant’s own 15ha farm just minutes down the road.
Dishes are cutting edge but comforting, and always a pleasure on the eye — as is that view over Lake Daylesford.
SARDINE
It’s a cliché, but order the sardines at Sardine.
Fresh off the trawler from nearby Lakes Entrance, what chef Mark Briggs serves them with depends on the season, but in winter they could be barbecued and topped with a medley of smoked tomato, broad beans and sage, or in summer expect a simple Med vibe with chilli and garlic.
Ask for a quick lesson on filleting and you’ll quickly discover these delicate white-fleshed beauties are the highlight of a menu that champions Victoria’s best seafood in a quintessential East Gippsland setting.
UNDERBAR
There are plenty of good things to know about Underbar, the fine dining restaurant making a mark in Ballarat.
That it’s pronounced “oon-de-bar”, which means “wonderful, delectable” in Swedish, for one. That it seats just 16 people, is open just two nights a week and that you’ll be seated along a single communal table, or at the kitchen counter, should you wish a ringside view.
The menu changes every week, and makes the most of hyper-local produce which chef/owner Derek Boath transforms into a procession of dishes that are at once clever and refined and delicious to a fault.
TARRAWARRA
Tarrawarra has long been famed for its pinot and chardonnay and modern art museum but, thanks to chef Mark Ebbells, this Yarra Valley stalwart is now also worth visiting for some of the most creative and downright delicious food you’ll find in a winery setting.
Ebbells is making the most of the quarter-acre kitchen garden at his disposal, putting it to use in combinations you probably haven’t seen before, but will want to eat again.
Such as a fine dice of pumpkin and crisp apple bound in cashew cream and topped with quince and Yarra Valley salmon roe. Wow.
IGNI
For the ultimate antidote to any stuffy five-star dining experience, all roads lead to Geelong.
For almost four years, on an unassuming backstreet laneway, Aaron Turner has been serving multi-course feasts of fire and ferments to a soundtrack of Stevie Wonder, alongside a fridge filled with always interesting small producers stomping to the beat of their own grapes.
Moodily lit spacious tables are the canvas upon which an onslaught of terrific snacks begins every meal.
A DIY ethos of making, preserving, milling and baking is pervasive across the eight-course menu that looks increasingly to the divisive, sharp flavours of fermentation rather than the smoke and flames of the kitchen’s hearth.
REED + CO
Hamish Nugent and Rachel Reed — of Bright’s late lamented Tani Eat & Drink — have turned their attention to gin and in the process have made Reed & Co. into Bright’s brightest eat-drink destination.
In a converted mechanics workshop, the distillery door — which shares the space with Sixpence Coffee by day — offers the signature Remedy gin tastings in the afternoon and fire-flecked fare by night.
Following a similar local-produce-simply-treated ethos that was employed at Tani to such acclaim, a plate of cured meats and marinated olives might precede local trout or beef, with subtle Japanese accents across the short menu.
SEVILLE ESTATE
Picture this: a cellar door in the Yarra Valley where you sip and savour some of Victoria’s best wines while drinking in a view that takes in vineyards, paddocks and misted mountaintops.
That’s what you get at Seville Estate … and that’s before you even sit down to a meal.
Seville’s restaurant — all pale timber and picture windows — is as enchanting, an informal space managed by a front-of-house team whose enthusiasm for the district and its charms is infectious.
Tucked down a dirt road, on a landscaped ridge, Seville Estate was named 2019 Winery of the Year by wine doyen James Halliday.
MIDNIGHT STARLING
Those in the know have long known that just an hour out of Melbourne the state’s best duck a l’orange is found.
At Kyneton’s Midnight Starling you’ll find Steve Rogers putting his experience gained in top Parisian kitchens to terrific use across a menu that comes in both a la carte and degustation form, both in the wood-panelled dining room and in the moody wine cellar below.
With a terrific wine list that teams Gallic classics with local heroes, Midnight Starling nails the French bistro brief with untold class, delivering a lesson in fantastically enjoyable food that never fails to bring a smile.
DOOT DOOT DOOT
Jackalope is the Mornington Peninsula’s lap of ultra-modern luxury, a vineyard hotel where guests stay in elegant lairs — not rooms — and “rebellious” sculpture adorns public spaces.
But don’t rush to judgment, expecting its fine-dining restaurant — Doot Doot Doot — to be arty with a capital A. It’s not.
Executive chef Guy Stanaway is informed by Jackalope’s high design instincts but his good value five-course menus, changing every eight or so weeks, shrewdly balance cool composition with warm, flavour-forward cooking.
Nothing is superfluous in a Stanaway dish, every ingredient — many drawn from Doot’s own kitchen garden — designed to beguile the eye or tantalise the tongue.
PORT PHILLIP ESTATE
On a clear day, you can see Phillip Island from Port Phillip Estate.
But the best views at this stark ’n’ stylish winery are sometimes right in front of you.
Chef Stuart Deller’s cooking is more approachable and exciting than ever.
Roasted Murray cod with warrigal greens, whipped roe and razorback prawns is one of the most delicious dishes we’ve eaten this year.
Many diners linger by the open fire after a meal here or visit the cellar door, enjoying the scenery and wondering why they should ever leave.
FULL PORT PHILLIP ESTATE REVIEW
SOURCE DINING
Whether it’s a bowl of slow-braised goat tossed through supple orecchiette and topped with fennel-fragrant pangrattato, or local mushrooms and roasted chestnuts in a risotto of refined beauty, or simply the offer of another slice of sourdough to smear with smoked whipped brown butter, lunch at Kyneton’s Source Dining remains one of the best celebrations of the region.
The hyper-local wine list filled with loads of lovely sub-$50 a bottle drinking is as much a pleasure to read as it is to drink from, while the menu filled with accomplished bistro classics that are big on flavour, technique and portion size means no one’s leaving hungry.
YIELD
Simon and Kara Stewart took over Birregurra Farm Foods and, on the first day of spring last year opened Yield, a one-two restaurant and provisions store.
It was exciting news for the tiny Victorian town of just 828, for now with Yield, Birregurra has two excellent reasons for food-lovers to pay a visit (the other being, of course, Brae).
In the handsome Main Street storefront space you’ll find Simon (ex Bespoke Harvest) cooking a daily changing set menu of four courses served with gentle humour and patent pride by Kara, who’s charged with telling the stories of the local producers to whom the concept pays its respects.
DU FERMIER
This coveted country French-style farmhouse restaurant is low on pomp, high on pleasure.
It’s just the spot to settle in, get cosy and let someone else do the cooking — that someone being Annie Smithers, the indefatigable chef, owner, baker and farmer behind Du Fermier.
There are no menus but know you’re in for three or four generous — and great value — courses that stick to the paddock-to-plate ethos with meats and poultry from the Trentham region and vegetables plucked fresh from Smithers’ garden.
Pop out the back and you’ll get a wide smile from Smithers toiling in the kitchen, in her element, or venturing out to serve a course or two under the eye of front-of-house pro Bronwyn Kabboord (ex Merricote).
MUSE AT MITCHELTON
Under the shadow of the iconic Robin Boyd-designed tower, Muse, Mitchelton Winery’s signature restaurant, nails its modern farmhouse brief within a Scandi-handsome dining room that boasts roaring open fire for winter and expansive vine-covered terrace come summer.
Familiar foods elevated and executed with class teamed with on-point service and value-forward estate wines, Muse is country style that’s all class.
FULL MUSE AT MITCHELTON REVIEW
MONTALTO
Seventeen years young, the big, rustic dining room — with bucolic vineyard views — is humming with creative energy and managed by a cracking front-of-house crew.
Abundant seasonal produce, grown on the property, shines in so many dishes.
From cime de rapa with rib eye and oyster cream to grilled cos with smoked freekeh and a poached tamarillo with licorice ice cream.
Tasting menus are good value here and best paired with top drops from Montalto winemaker Simon Black.
MASONS OF BENDIGO
There are few greater champions of the producers of their patch than Nick and Sonia Anthony of Masons of Bendigo.
Whether it’s the terrific all-Victorian wine list with its focus on local spirits and beers from within 100 clicks of Victoria’s fourth-largest city, or the extensive list of namechecked producers of the region across the large, peripatetic menu, Masons offers a true celebration of central Victoria.
Terrific smoked miso butter and cracking-crusted sourdough is a smashing opener before a choose-your-own adventure of plates large and small.
GLADIOILI
In terms of tiny towns that punch above their weight in the eat-drink stakes, Port Fairy stands above all others.
And much of that deliciousness is thanks to chef-restaurateur Matt Dempsey, who has a trio of venues in town, including the newly reborn fine diner, Gladioli.
In historic Seacombe House you’ll find one of the state’s best-value degustations — it tops out at $100 for seven courses — but where three courses of a la carte is just $65 a head.
It makes such plates as confit Great Ocean duck served with beetroot many ways — roasted, cubed, curled, puree — taste even better, where country-style generosity is teamed with city-style smarts.
CAPE
Thrusting towards Bass Strait like the jutting prow of a ship, with views over the bay and championship golf course, the RACV Cape Schanck Resort is the Mornington Peninsula’s most dramatic building.
Cape, the resort’s signature restaurant, puts drama on every plate as well.
In the capable hands of executive chef Josh Pelham, steamed wild hapuka and Port Phillip calamari are lapped by coastal sea vegetables, while peppered loin of kangaroo gets down and earthy with kale, saltbush and finger lime.
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