“That’s brilliant, you’ve got the opening of your article!” says Matt Preston, emphatically slapping the table.

We peer out the window of Kin Izakaya in Malvern, where a huge fox has casually wandered over the pedestrian crossing. The media personality bashes a search into his phone that reveals the Preston family crest – a fox atop a tailed chapeau. But this article isn’t about spooky coincidences; it’s about a journalist, former MasterChef Australia judge, radio host and cookbook author – often but not always in a cravat – and his neighbourhood.

Preston has lived in the inner south-eastern suburb of Malvern for more than 20 years. The affluent area is home to prestigious schools and heritage architecture, but change is unfurling on and around the retail strip of Glenferrie Road.

Sitting in Preston’s favourite coffee shop that morning, Master of None, the bones of a residential development loom on the other side of Malvern Station, while down the road, Essie Wine Bar has just opened a second Station Street venue, Italian restaurant Lulu Dining.

“This strip is the Brunswick Malvern, and then around the corner is old-school Malvern,” explains Preston. He’s sipping an almond-milk latte at the insistence of his personal trainer, who gave him an ultimatum to cut out either milk or pizza. Conveniently, the pistachio praline gelato at nearby Messina is excluded.

Preston swears by the coffee and toasties at this cosy cafe, where recycled plywood and timber exude wabi-sabi warmth. As if on cue, a woman walks in and exclaims to her buddy: “How cute is this!”

‘This strip is the Brunswick Malvern, and then around the corner is old-school Malvern.’

Matt Preston

Ask Preston to summarise his occupation and he’ll tell you he “eats cake for a living”. It doesn’t give the ABC Radio Melbourne presenter, weekly columnist in Stellar magazine, Delicious senior editor, eight-times best-selling cookbook author and television host enough credit. “No, but it kind of sums everything up,” he says. “I’m an excitable enthusiast and also endlessly hungry.” We settle on “insatiable, excitable enthusiast”.

Pre-MasterChef, Preston travelled the world writing for glossy magazines, armed with a photographer and an appetite. He reviewed restaurants from the late ’90s, landing on the Good Food Guide radar in 1996 after a rave write-up on Le Petit Bourgeois in Malvern East (now a Chinese restaurant) resulted in reviewers being unable to nab a table before the print deadline. In 2000, Preston took over Matthew Evans’ weekly Epicure review column, the former name of this masthead. He contributed until MasterChef Australia first aired in 2009.

One of the more recent feathers in Preston’s chapeau is memoir-writing. Big Mouth was released last year and is as much an insight into MasterChef as it is Preston’s life prior, from his eyeliner-sporting band and stint in the British Army, to his adoption and family tragedies.

It’s also another signpost of how much the man loves cake. Chapter 49 kicks off with a section called “what your choice of cake says about you”, in which Preston and Natalie Paull from Beatrix Bakes have written a sort of baked-goods astrology.

It begs the question – what does Preston’s cake choice say about him? He lauds Mietta by Rosemary, which is closed when we meet, and has been visiting Millstone, a little slice of Paris in Malvern, since Alice Wright opened it a decade ago.

Preston moans audibly while chewing the apple tarte tatin with a thick, biscuity base. I contact Paull for her analysis, deliberately withholding its purpose. She’s frighteningly accurate: “Apple tarte tatin types are easy,” she writes. “They are sweet classicists, restrained passions with a judgemental bent. They believe there’s nowhere to hide with a tarte tatin ... a faultless tatin makes them hopeful, knowing someone else is on their impeccable wavelength.”

I follow Preston along Station Street towards Glenferrie Road. We stop at Shahi India, a marvellously disorganised Indian grocer where Preston celebrates frozen green chana for dhal, unearths a jar of turmeric root achaar he’s never tried, and insists on buying me a packet of kasuri methi (fenugreek leaves) on the proviso I add it to meat rubs and salads, not just butter chicken.

“For me, the great joy whenever you travel is to go to the market and see what’s interesting there, and then go to the supermarket and see the snack aisle. That will tell you what people really love in a country,” he says.

It’s also true of the Malvern microcosm. After failing to find speck at a local continental butcher (Preston must have been on a mission and skimmed over the word “kosher”), he popped into Malvern Continental Butchers & Delicatessen, a family-run, German-Swiss smallgoods manufacturer that smokes products out the back over fire. The glass cabinets heave with sausages, whole smoked tongues and European smallgoods like presswurst, which, when sliced, resembles a very un-kosher stained-glass window.

Owner Dean Collins bought the 70-plus-year-old business eight years ago. He’s fresh out of the lachsschinken dry-cured and smoked pork loin, which Preston calls “the smoked salmon of meat”. One of the five Collins sons pipes up and offers freshly boiled, house-smoked Frankfurters instead. There’s a satisfying pop and swirl of steam as Preston snaps his in half. Just when we think it can’t get any better, Collins asks: “Do you want mustard with that?”

After a quick stop at M&M Hot Bread for a takeaway banh mi on the recommendation of fellow former MasterChef judge and chef Gary Mehigan, Preston suddenly halts. “Look!” he says, reaching into a Readings bookshop sale stand. Wedged between a thriller novel and former prime minister John Howard’s musings on balance is his first cookbook, Matt Preston’s 100 Best Recipes. “That’s a bargain!” he announces.

It’s a few minutes before close when we arrive at Little Sister Bakery. The shelves are bare, but I tell Preston to return for the seeded Sofia loaf (which, for the record, is unfortunately not named after me). I don’t know it at the time, but Preston will text me the very next morning, singing the praises of the caramelised onion sourdough, seeded Sofia loaf and shakshuka pocket, which he’ll time for exactly 10.20am so it’s hot from the oven.

As we exit the bakery, two teenagers run up behind us, asking if Preston is “that guy from MasterChef” and can they please take a selfie. I offer to take the picture, but Preston blows my cover as a new judge and pulls me in.

“Let me guess,” he says to the duo, “Yo-Chi, Grill’d and Messina.” They nod enthusiastically at the mention of their regulars. A discussion follows about the latter’s pay-by-weight model (“watch out for the pearls,” advises Preston) and they suggest a frozen yoghurt challenge for the next season of MasterChef Australia.

At Otter’s Promise beer bar, I ask Preston if he ever tires of being recognised. He pours a Belgian lambic beer that he reports tastes like sour milk and burnt rubber tyres – in a good way.

“You’ll find that all people want to talk to you about now is food … ‘What do you like to cook? How do you do it? What’s your favourite bit of paella?’ All those kinds of conversations,” he says. “There’s nothing that’s not beautiful about that.”

These days, Preston covers topics beyond food on ABC Radio Melbourne on Saturday from 8am to noon. He only added a food slot 18 months ago, not wanting to be “too predictable”.

“I did nothing but talk about food for 14 years,” he says. “That’s why I love radio, because I get to talk about music, or gardening, or poison spitfire caterpillars.”

We stroll back down Glenferrie Road to Wang Wang BBQ. A north-eastern Chinese restaurant that specialises in Qiqihar (pronounced “Chi-chi-har”) barbecue.

The young waiter obligingly strides from our table to the kitchen under a barrage of questions from two “insatiable excitable enthusiasts”. No one seems to know what makes it specifically Qiqihar, until our investigative Googling reveals that Qiqihar refers simply to grass-fed cattle.

Glowing-hot coals are brought to the table, followed by the dishes. The Qiqihar marinated meat is decent, though thin fat-laced sheets of karubi rib are better, and a gada-dough drop soup better again. The latter affords the salty nostalgia of Maggi seasoning, stippled with spatzle’s gnarlier cousin.

“That’s one of the challenges of tasting stuff for a living; this whole idea that you are always searching for a better flavour,” says Preston.

We pose for a photo with the staff after our barbecue session and head towards Harvie, a narrow, art deco bar that is technically in Armadale.

Preston makes a beeline for the rooftop. The “mind your head” decal on the spiral staircase is made for his frame – “190 centimetres in bare feet,” he assures me.

The CBD twinkles in the distance, and we’re adequately warmed by heaters, blankets and in Preston’s case, a hot buttered rum and tasting paddle of agave-based spirits from Echuca (mezcal is his favourite drink).

On the way to our final destination, Preston gives me a tour of his local Italian restaurant, Made in Casa. We’re greeted by a woman with a thick Italian accent who tells us the owners are in Italy.

Dough is slapped onto paddles and plunged into the wood-fired oven. Tables are set with china and floral wallpaper surrounds the fireplace. Preston refers lovingly to the interior as “nana’s parlour”. He also swears by the mortadella pizza with buffalo stracciatella and pistachio.

We’ve come full circle to Kin Izakaya on Station Street, near to and owned by Master of None. We snack on chicken nanban, deep-fried and served with a gribiche-like mayonnaise; slippers of torched salmon and the unexpectedly delightful snack of iburi gakko (smoked pickled radish) with cream cheese on crackers. Kin opened in April, but owner Tennyson Andrew says it takes a few years to become a neighbourhood fixture.

“The whole idea of the local restaurant is such a powerful thing,” says Preston. “The owner on the floor doing a really good thing for the locals, supported by the locals … I think that’s what makes Melbourne’s food and wine scene so strong.”