Dining room with a view: Melbourne’s best sky-high restaurants
Looking for an elevated dining experience? Here are five Melbourne restaurants taking sky-high dining to a new level.
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Looking for a more elevated dining experience in Melbourne? Look up.
The city is blessed with several rooftop bars and restaurants that are serving up views to die for along with top eats, including a couple of new establishments that have quickly become hot spots, including among the city’s A-listers.
So if twirling crab pasta on your fork, sipping a chilled glass of wine and watching the lights twinkle eighty floors above the city sounds good to you, here are five restaurants taking rooftop dining in Melbourne to a whole new level.
ATRIA AT RITZ-CARLTON
Eighty floors above Melbourne the lights of the city fizz like champagne.
They sparkle as brightly as the French silverware on our white-clothed table and glint like our waiter’s cheeky smile.
You can’t help but get drunk on that view at Atria, the long-awaited sky-high Ritz-Carlton restaurant.
It’s a different world up here — a magical place where everyone gets to play millionaire.
Atria is less show, more subtle woah. It’s one of many hotel restaurants in this city, but feels the most unlike a hotel of them all.
Local boy Michael Greenlaw’s cooking has a lot to do with this.
He leads the kitchen, under the direction of Aussie chef Mark Best, after stints at Michelin-starred restaurants abroad and longtime city fave Vue de monde.
Greenlaw’s style is more classic with a native bent — and it’s clear he’s put in the work to design a menu that’s as exciting to read as it is to eat.
Read the Herald Sun’s Atria review in full here.
Location: Level 80, 650 Lonsdale St, Melbourne.
LEONIE UPSTAIRS
The nondescript entrance at Leonie Upstairs leads to a tantalising taste of Japan, where sake takes an equal footing to food.
It couldn’t feel more Japanese. But then, it’s all very Melbourne, too – the nondescript entry, accessed through a gelataria that’s pumping despite the frigid midwinter weather. Once upstairs, however, Melbourne melts away.
A menu encompasses classic Japanese drinking snacks such as tempura, house-made pickles and plump, fried oysters – juicy inside, panko-crispy out.
The popular izakaya dish takowasa, of raw octopus with a nasal-cleansing punch of wasabi, is marinated with salted kombu.
Scallop carpaccio dressed with pansies, dill fronds and ruby-red grapefruit is gorgeous to look at, but the citrus almost overpowers the delicate mollusc.
Sake shares top billing with the food, with a list topping out at 50 different bottles (without a single wine). Sensing our decision paralysis, the waiter steers us towards the recently introduced sake flights and walks us through a tasting.
For dessert, the blue cheesecake combines three cheeses with a hint of yuzu; more dense and satisfying than the typical souffle-style Japanese version (even if it could stand a minute more out of the fridge before serving).
This is an edited version of a review by Delicious Magazine Editor Krysia Bonkowski.
Location: Level 1/15-17 Lincoln Square S, Carlton
STELLA RESTAURANT AND BAR
Tagliolini granchio. It’s a mouthful to say, but sure ain’t hard to swallow at Stella.
That neat twist of millimetre-fine silky egg noodles, glossed in prawn bisque and snow white crabmeat is a thing of beauty.
No sooner than it lands at the table, it’s devoured by two hungry mouths.
Melbourne’s pretty spoiled for pasta joints. Do we have enough? Probably.
More to the point, do we need another along South Yarra’s sorry and sodden Chapel St?
After two decades in property development, he’s dabbling in the restaurant game after being inspired by dad Hossein, who ran Italian restaurants abroad for 40 years.
Chef John Park leads the kitchen, best known for his work at 400 Gradi, Prahran’s Ines Wine Bar further along Chapel St, and most recently at The Meatball and Wine Bar.
It’s not just about pasta – there are also eight pies made from a Mousavi family sauce and base recipe, as well as antipasti snacks and those typical kingfish crude, burrata and tartrate suspects you’d expect at a mod-Italian spot.
The latter ($28) uses the leaner girello beef cut, diced into tiny cubes and jumbled with shallots, capers, cornichons and mustard seeds, topped with avruga caviar and quail egg.
It’s well-seasoned and there are wicked textures at play.
Stella may be South Yarra’s buzzy new it-spot, and while it will not change the Chapel St dining scene overnight it’s certainly pushing things in the right direction.
This is an edited version of The Herald Sun’s review.
Location: 427 Chapel St, South Yarra.
VUE DE MONDE
Things aren’t always as they seem at Vue de monde.
Gumnuts tangled in an eucalyptus wreath turn out to be wattleseed choccies, and that outback “roo-shi” isn’t from Japan. And when things start as slam-the-table-good as the macadamia and smoked eel tofu, you know you’re in serious danger of falling head over heels for Melbourne’s bucketlist diner in the clouds.
Wunderchef Hugh Allen is making his mark on a restaurant almost as old as he is, taking your experience to lofty heights beyond Vue’s 55 floors with vision, sophisticated techniques and respect for ingredients – while having a lot of fun in the process.
This is an edited version of a review by delicious.com.au
Location: 55 Rialto Towers, 525 Collins St.
BEVERLY ROOFTOP
Few venues are equally geared towards fashionistas and meteorologists. But Beverly, a sweeping rooftop eyrie 24 floors above Chapel Street, nails the double threat thanks to its Instagram good looks and the reliable spectacle of Melbourne’s four seasons in one day rolling in across Port Phillip Bay.
The vast space on top of the glam new Goldfields House high-rise is prepared for all seasons thanks to a Rod Laver Arena-style retractable glass roof that makes short work of bad weather.
The luscious curves of the 200-seat space are a hallmark of Mitchell & Eades, the design duo behind Grill Americano and Carlton Wine Room.
In the wood-fired open kitchen, chef David Ball is busy emulating the surroundings in food.
Snack-wise, bluefin tartare is served on a tostada with chilli yuzu mayo, pulled duck and caviar sliders are dosed with dill ranch dressing and freshly shucked oysters are anointed with tequila mignonette.
Heading larger, expect to see marron and spanner crab pasta, spice-rubbed rotisserie chicken or a rich and comforting mac’n’cheese with truffled gouda and mornay sauce.
Things can certainly get high end at altitude, but co-owner Cam Northway promises to keep Beverly’s feet on the ground.
“I like keeping things fluid. I don’t like being told at restaurants that if you’re in this area you have to have this particular menu or you have to be eating food or doing this,” Northway says “Above all, it’s meant to be a space that you feel comfortable in.”
- by Larissa Dubecki.
Find the full review at delicious.com.au
Location: 627 Chapel Street, South Yarra
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