Best Restaurants in Melbourne

The best room in Melbourne. The restaurant that justifies the occasion.

Andrew McConnell's most ambitious restaurant is the place Melbourne points to when it needs to prove itself. Dark timber, warm light, the feeling of a serious European brasserie that happens to be in Australia. The rotisserie chicken is the dish everyone talks about but the whole menu earns it — the kitchen is technically exceptional without being theatrical about it.

“The kind of dinner you remember three years later.”

Small, confident, no unnecessary theatre. The room that feels most like Melbourne.

The menu at Etta is short and changes regularly — whatever they're doing with pasta that week is almost certainly the thing to order. The wine list is excellent and the staff actually know it, which sounds like a low bar until you've been to enough places where they don't. This is the kind of restaurant Melbourne does better than any other Australian city.

The best bowl in Melbourne. Full stop.

Victoria Street in Richmond is Melbourne's Vietnamese precinct, and Pho Hung Vuong is the one locals actually go to. The beef pho is the benchmark — clear broth, proper brisket, the right amount of everything. $18. Nothing in the city at three times the price comes close. The Vietnamese iced coffee afterwards is mandatory.

“$18 and nothing at three times the price comes close.”

Melbourne's best pasta. No argument worth having.

The handmade pasta program at Tipo 00 is the reason to go — specifically whatever the filled pasta is that week. Small room, always full, worth every bit of the booking effort. The natural wine list is one of the most considered at this price point in the city. Solo at the bar is underrated — you get the best view of the kitchen.

Modern Chinese done properly. The room is loud. That's part of it.

Victor Liong's restaurant in the CBD is the best modern Chinese in Melbourne — technically exceptional, culturally confident, genuinely exciting to eat. The mapo tofu alone justifies the booking. The XO pipis, the crab roe dumplings if they're on. Not a quiet dinner — a proper night out.

The croissant that reset Melbourne's standards. Worth the queue.

Kate Reid's croissants are the best in Australia and among the best in the world — this is not hyperbole, it's the settled consensus of people who have eaten croissants in Paris. The queue on weekends is real. The plain croissant is the benchmark to order — the technique is visible in every layer. Go early and you'll understand why Melbourne takes its food seriously.

Vietnamese fine dining that earns the description without losing the soul.

Thi Le's restaurant takes Vietnamese food seriously as a fine dining proposition — the dishes are recognisably Vietnamese in spirit, technically exceptional in execution. The bánh mì at lunch is the best in Melbourne, and that's a competitive category. The tasting menu at dinner is one of the most interesting meals in the city at any price.

A wine bar that happens to serve exceptional food from a wood oven.

The natural wine list at Embla is the reason it exists — deep, considered, genuinely exciting without being inaccessible. The food matches it: simple preparations of excellent produce, driven by what's coming off the wood oven. Stand at the bar with a glass of something orange and ask what just came out of the kitchen. This is what Melbourne does.

Persian food worth driving across the city for. Fifteen years in, still at the top.

Joseph Abboud's restaurant in Brunswick has been quietly exceptional for the better part of two decades. The lamb dishes are the point — slow-cooked, spiced with restraint, served with bread that's made the way bread should be. The room is warm and unhurried. It doesn't have the profile of the CBD restaurants and doesn't need it.

The best natural wine list in Melbourne at a price that doesn't require an occasion.

The wine list at Neighbourhood Wine on Swan Street is one of the most carefully considered in Melbourne — interesting producers from Australia and Europe, honest prices, staff who give recommendations without being insufferable about it. The food is good and deliberately simple. The wine is the reason to go.