Victoria’s most influential restaurants of the past 30 years
These are the 30 most influential restaurants of the past 30 years that have helped transform our city and our state into a truly world-class – and world-famous – dining destination. And there's some familiar faces behind them.
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Dining out in Melbourne in 1990 sure did look different to today.
We smoked our hearts out in restaurants and washed down our corn-fed chicken with sun-dried tomato with big, buttery chardonnays like there was no tomorrow. Until the recession hit, that is.
Laneways were for rubbish, not restaurants, BYO was king, and we most certainly didn’t queue to get in.
Much has changed in Melbourne’s dining scene over the past 30 years, including the sheer number of restaurants that have opened – and closed – in that time.
But as much as things have changed, one thing remains as true today as it did back then: an enduring and enveloping sense of hospitality remains the beating heart of our city.
Even as the industry grapples with the far-reaching ramifications of Victoria’s extended lockdown, our chefs and restaurateurs are evolving, adapting and coming up with the type of creative solutions to these unprecedented times that will ensure our restaurants will thrive once again when they reopen their doors.
For hospitality has weathered many a crisis over the past three decades – from the introduction of the GST to the GFC; the recession of the early 1990s through to the skills shortage of the 2010s.
Here are the 30 most influential restaurants that have helped transform our city and our state into a truly world-class – and world-famous – dining destination.
ATTICA
Saltbush and Davidson plum. Lemon myrtle and quandong and finger lime. If you’ve dined in a contemporary Australian restaurant any time over the past few years you would’ve encountered many of these ingredients.
Once unknown products of our land are now used extensively – and we have a Kiwi-born chef, Ben Shewry, to thank. Celebrating wild indigenous ingredients in thoughtful and emotive ways – and putting them on the world stage thanks to Attica’s fixture on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for much of the 2010s – Shewry interprets Australia with wit and whimsy in surprising – but always delicious – ways.
BRAE
Dan Hunter, fresh from Spain’s acclaimed Mugaritz restaurant, moved to Dunkeld and quickly put the Royal Mail on the map, but it’s at Birregurra’s Brae where his life’s work has come to fruition. Since 2013 and with an ever-increasing connection to the 12ha of Otways hinterlands on which the farmhouse and uber-luxe accommodation sit, Hunter’s artful evocation of Australia has inspired a young generation of chefs and an older generation of global gastro tourists alike.
CAFE DI STASIO
Rinaldo di Stasio’s eponymous restaurant St Kilda restaurant – the long-favoured salon for the rich, the famous, artists and architects – has been recently joined by ultra-glamorous CBD sibling Citta where the formula of modern art intersecting with hospitality’s timeless arts remains.
CHIN CHIN
Waiting for a Chin Chin table is a Melbourne dining rite of passage. It’s spawned a hundred mod Asian imitators who wrapped their rice paper rolls and noodles in neon hoping to emulate its astonishing success, but there is only one Chin Chin. Loud, fun and funky, it’s where baristas and barristers alike come for cool cocktails and a hot feed.
CICCIOLINA
One of the original no-bookings restaurants, Cicciolina – and its rollicking back bar – remains a favourite of St Kilda locals for its vibrant Italian fare.
CIRCA, THE PRINCE
A roll call of some of Melbourne’s biggest names passed through the flagship restaurant of St Kilda’s The Prince hotel during the 2000s: Michael Lambie, Andrew McConnell, Matt Wilkinson and Paul Wilson to name a few. In its heyday Circa was one of Melbourne’s glamour restaurants and though it’s gone through chefs and incarnations, remains today one of St Kilda’s most lovely rooms and its new, more casual, direction is finding as many fans as the fine diner had before it.
CUMULUS INC
While he’s most famous for adding the lobster roll to the roll call of Melbourne’s most famous dishes – first at St Kilda’s Golden Fields (RIP), now seen at the city’s buzzy Supernormal canteen – but Andrew McConnell’s more lasting achievement is introducing Melbourne to the concept of all-day dining packaged with restaurant flair. Opening in 2008 and from breakfast until late, many ideas and dishes now seen on casual menus throughout Melbourne began life at Cumulus.
DU FERMIER
Taking her Stephanie Alexander training and turning it into a love of French farmhouse cooking, Annie Smithers was one of the first to truly champion the farm to fork ethos at her central Victorian restaurants – first at her eponymous Kyneton bistro, now at Trentham’s Du Fermier. There’s no menu – just three ever-changing courses of fare from her farm – but eating at Annie’s is like being welcomed into an old friend’s home. A friend who’s one of the best cooks around.
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In late 90s Melbourne Philippa Sibley and Yorkshireman Donovan Cooke were our city’s culinary power couple. At a time when fine dining was going out of fashion – with such icons as Mietta’s, Stephanie’s and Paul Bocuse closing – the duo repackaged rigorous cooking and rare ingredients into a restaurant with rock star cool. Est Est Est. The then-married duo went on to create Luxe and Ondine; two equally important restaurants of the early 2000s.
FENIX
More than a decade before Heston flew in on Fat Duck to cook us Dinner, and long before he was a MasterChef Gary Mehigan and Raymond Capaldi were pushing the mad scientist/molecular gastronomy envelope at their Yarra River-side restaurant Fenix. A young George Calombaris followed Capaldi from the Sofitel to Richmond and then took the wild flavour pairings and dry ice with him to his first head chef role at the acclaimed but short-lived Reserve at Federation Square.
FLOWER DRUM
The first to truly elevate Chinese cuisine from formica into fine-dining, Melbourne’s world-famous Cantonese restaurant, Flower Drum, has chalked up decades of Peking duck pancakes, fabled off-the-menu fare and deals and birthdays toasted with Krug.
FRANCE SOIR
When it’s steak frites you want, France-Soir is the place Melbourne has gone for more than 30 years. Theatrically, inimitably French, it’s changed little over that time and that’s very much its appeal. One of the most extensive French cellars found in the country – some 2000 bottles and counting – keeps that steak (and escargot and cassoulet) in good company.
IGNI
Flame-licked and fermented fare washed down with boundary-pushing wines served in a hip backstreet address in … Geelong? Chef Aaron Turner turned heads when he was cooking at Loam, but it’s at Igni that Turner is making the most of the best of the Bellarine produce and in doing so undeniably gave Geelong its food groove. His Hot Chicken Project side hustle has also spawned many imitators.
JACQUES REYMOND
A towering presence over Melbourne’s dining landscape for more than two decades since he took the keys to his eponymous Windsor mansion, Jacques Reymond applied his classical – and undeniably French – training and, in time, incorporated Asian ingredients and techniques to be at the vanguard of defining a modern Australian cuisine and aesthetic.
LAKE HOUSE
An overnight success three decades in the making, one of Melbourne’s favourite destinations for a weekend country getaway would not be what it is without Alla Wolf-Tasker’s vision, fortitude and passion for regional dining. Daylesford today is a long way from the tiny country town it once was, and Wolf-Tasker’s championing of the specialist provedores and artisan culinary trades has created a Central Victorian food bowl the envy of the state, with a meal at Lake House, the quintessential country manor, an always celebratory affair.
MECCA BAH
When it opened in 2002 the Docklands redevelopment was full of promise, New Quay full of restaurants taking advantage of the city’s new-found harbourside views. The buzziest of them all was Mecca Bah, a waterside outpost of Southgate’s Mecca, where young head chef Nicky Riemer (who would go on to helm Langton’s and then her own Union Dining in Richmond) served Cath Claringbold’s modern Middle Eastern mezze to those exploring the new precinct.
MELBOURNE WINE ROOM
So much of what we take for granted when eating and drinking in Melbourne today is thanks to one man – Donlevy Fitzpatrick – and his The Dog’s Bar in St Kilda. Around the corner with his development of the George Hotel complex it was the Melbourne Wine Room – where a young Karen Martini would earn her apron – that cemented the version of a modern Melbourne bar that endures to today.
MOMO
First in a sultry subterranean CBD space, then in a sexy five-star Hyatt hotel dining room, Greg Malouf revolutionised Middle Eastern in Melbourne with MoMo. Having transformed O’Connell’s in South Melbourne from a pot-and-parma pub to a gourmet dining destination, Malouf went on to elevate the food of his Lebanese heritage to special occasion status with such iconic dishes as his pigeon bisteeya.
MOVIDA
While COVID has put paid to them for now – and likely forever – it’s almost hard to remember how revolutionary MoVida’s take on tapas and “plates designed to share” was in 2003 entree-main-dessert Melbourne. But it wasn’t just small Spanish bites Frank Camorra introduced to the city – the anchovy toast with tomato sorbet remains one of the city’s must-try tastes – but also the concept of eating a meal at the bar.
PEARL
Two words: mud crab. Or maybe three: red duck curry. At the turn of the century for a decade Melbourne’s chic set lunched long and dined fine at Geoff Lindsay’s Pearl, where Asian flavours were plated with a modern sensibility to create an early noughties Zeitgeist.
PT LEO ESTATE
Redefining the art of winery dining – or indeed dining full stop – the $50 million winery-cum-sculpture park Pt Leo offers everything from fried chicken Fridays on the terrace to six-course wine-matched menus in the fine-dining Laura to accessible, and always delicious, fare in the bustling bistro. Once one of Sydney’s finest chefs, Phil Wood now calls the peninsula home and its produce his plaything. And Victoria is all the better for it.
ROCKPOOL
It’s the restaurant that brought Melbourne the $100 steak. At his flagship Melbourne restaurant, Neil Perry taught a generation of chefs and diners the importance of impeccable produce and made stars out of his producers, such as David Blackmore for his wagyu.
ROYAL MAIL HOTEL
Most modern Melbourne restaurants profess a farm-to-fork ethos but none can compare with the paddock to plate provenance found at the Royal Mail. At the foothills of the Grampians, Australia’s largest kitchen garden informs the daily-evolving menu served at hotel’s two restaurants: Wickens and the more casual Parker Street Project. It’s seasonal eating at its finest.
STEPHANIE’S
Before writing the book that would become a staple in kitchens across the country (A Cook’s Companion) Stephanie Alexander’s eponymous restaurant – first in Fitzroy, then a grand Hawthorn mansion – was one of Melbourne’s very best. Alexander’s French-influenced fare was created out of a produce-first philosophy that is commonplace now but groundbreaking at the time.
STOKEHOUSE
Not many restaurants cause a Premier to declare “a tragedy”, but such is the affection with which Melbourne holds St Kilda’s Stokehouse that when it burnt down on the eve of its 25th anniversary it made headlines around the country. Reborn anew in the summer of 2016 in six-star sustainable glory, for many a moneyed Melburnian the Stokehouse is the only restaurant that matters: for business, for pleasure, for long lunches of seafood and late nights of steak and shiraz and, of course, for drinking in the most glorious views the bay offers.
THE STATION HOTEL
Melbourne has a Pierre Koffman-trained chef to thank for transforming inner suburban pubs into places where restaurant-quality produce is used to destination-dining effect. Pre-empting the hipsterfication of Footscray by a decade, at The Station Hotel Sean Donovan made steaks a reason to visit, while today he straddles the pub/restaurant divide with class at Prahran’s Mt Erica and Fitzroy’s Town Hall Hotel.
TULUM
Elevating the food of his home, Coskun Uysal has redefined what eating Turkish means to Melbourne at his four-year-old Balaclava restaurant, Tulum, the reigning delicious 100 best restaurant in Victoria. With fans including Nigella Lawson who said Tulum made her “heart sing”, Uysal transforms local produce into modern mix-and-match meze that celebrates the various regions of Turkey with artful flair.
VERGE
Routinely named one of the very best in the front of house biz, Simon Denton has played a starring role in Melbourne’s dining evolution since running the Adelphi dining room in the 90s and opening Verge on Spring St in 2001. For a decade it was one of the city’s hottest restaurants and Denton-trained waiters elevating the art of service throughout the state. While the space has undergone numerous incarnations since Verge closed in 2011, Denton is still there to offer a superb splash of something interesting at what is now his Denton Wine Bar.
VUE DE MODE
Since a 24-year-old Shannon Bennett first burst onto the scene with his wildly ambitious take on haute French cuisine in a Carlton terrace in 2000, Vue de monde has been consistently one of Melbourne’s best – and most expensive – restaurants. Exacting classical French technique teamed with the best-possible ingredients to create a multi-course, many-hour dining extravaganza that truly elevated dinner into An Event.
WALTER’S WINE BAR
It might’ve swapped cool culinary cred for the busy buzz of a tourist precinct today, but back in 1992 Southgate was hip and happening. There was Blake’s by hot chef Andrew Blake, Mecca with Cath Claringbold on the pass and Walter’s Wine Bar, where Melbourne came to sip Chablis before an Arts Centre show. It was, for 21 years, one of the city’s finest day-through-night venues that made the most of its sprawling CBD-and-Yarra views.
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