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It’s a natural wine bar. It’s a community radio station. It’s the town square for Melbourne creatives, models and hangers-on, its courtyard doubling as a runway for the latest in miscreant couture.

Three years since it nuked the zeitgeist and installed itself as the place to drink and be seen, Hope St Radio has a new chef. Blake Ellis’s braised celeriac is inspired, served over rust-coloured ajo blanco and under an awning of pickled radicchio.

Oysters are lifted by fermented mandarin hot sauce. Yurrita anchovies in clarified tomato water dotted with basil oil are a fitting sidekick to a tuft of focaccia. The excellent pasta remains (see: rigatoni with pureed silverbeet and pangrattato). Into newfangled wines and avant-garde EDM? There’s nowhere you’d rather be.