Eat your way around Melbourne

Before I visited Melbourne for the first time, more than a few friends told me that its innovative restaurants, neighborhood wine bars, cozy cafés, and hidden cocktail dens would remind me of back home in New York City. And, indeed, I felt an immediate kinship with the city: It’s a place that’s obsessive about its coffee (don’t get an Australian started on flat whites), infatuated with long and leisurely breakfasts, and positively mad for the boundary-pushing, spice-filled cuisines of its myriad immigrant communities. Sure, that means stand-out Italian and Greek, Vietnamese and Chinese food, but also Burmese, Afghan, Pakistani, Macedonian, Croatian, Mauritian, and Sudanese. And, increasingly, it also means Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cuisine that’s born directly of this land.

Here, a weekend’s worth of excellent restaurants, markets, and bakeries that run the gamut from quick bites to award-winning fine-dining spots.

The first thing you notice when you step inside Serai—which is hidden down an alley off Little Bourke Street in the CBD—is the incense-like perfume of wood smoke. Heavily tattooed chef Ross Magnaye draws on his Filipino heritage (his grandmother was a restaurateur back home) for a menu that pairs fire-grilled dishes with an all-natural wine list and tropical cocktails that include ingredients like ube, pandan, and calamansi. The trick is to come with a group so you can order a table-covering array of shareable small plates, including a McScallop, a fried scallop with crab fat sauce on pandesal (a fluffy bun) or seared kangaroo kilawin (kind of like a meat ceviche) served atop a marrow bone.

What to order: The “Wood Fired” section of the menu is filled with simply prepared hits like Gippsland lamb ribs in sticky adobo sauce, pig’s head sisig tacos, and Port Lincoln calamari with smoked longganisa ‘nduja dressing. But the stealth MVP is the cabbage “tocino,” an umami-packed veggie play on the Filipino sweet, cured-pork dish.

Italians have played an enormous role in shaping Melbourne food culture, and this CBD (central business district) pasta bar is perhaps the buzziest place to experience the future of Italian cooking. That’s not to say Tipo 00’s food is fussy or overly refined: Any nonna would recognize the flavors in dishes like pappardelle with braised duck or spaghetti with Moreton bay bug (an Aussie slipper lobster) and tomato butter—and they’d certainly appreciate the gently remixed classics like snapper crudo with salted peach and nasturtium, or charred octopus with fermented tomato and celery.

What to order: The chef’s tasting menu will give you the best bang for your buck, but if you decide to go a la carte, get out of your red-sauce comfort zone. Chef Andreas Papadakis knows his way around offal, which you can try in dishes like grilled ox tongue with balsamic and pink peppercorn.

Tip: Reservations open at midnight 42 days ahead of time, and fill up fast. If you can’t snag a res, walk in during lunch, the perfect time to belly up to the bar for an aperitivo and a bowl of pasta.

Bush tucker—what locals call native Australian ingredients—is showing up everywhere in the country’s fine-dining scene. You’ll see ingredients like wallaby and warrigal greens being used by chefs from all backgrounds, but if you want to taste them as interpreted by a true Indigenous food pioneer, stop into Big Esso, a fun-loving bar and restaurant in culture-filled Fed Square.

Chef-owner Nornie Bero is a member of the Komet tribe, an Indigenous community that hails from the Torres Strait Islands, and she’s the founder of Mabu Mabu, which sells souvenir-worthy hot sauces, spices, and more. Here, she has filled the menu with wildly inventive dishes like emu heart anticuchos (South American–inspired grilled skewers) and crocodile ribs in bush tomato and pepperberry brown sauce. Just as creative are the cocktails, which are made with ingredients like green ants, quandong fruit, finger lime, peppermint gum syrup.

What to order: This is the kind of restaurant where it pays to be chatty. Many of the words on the menu will likely be new to you—Goolwa pipis (cockles), kubi kim (taro), saltbush (a briny succulent)—so chat with your server about the ingredients and let them guide you.

It feels almost criminal to categorize this laminated-dough laboratory as casual, because its buttery pastries are approached with the precision of a scientist—quite literally. Before she founded Lune in 2012, Kate Reid was a Formula 1 aerodynamicist who designed race cars. Today, her pastries have a cult-like following—you can expect a queue at pretty much all of the locations, including three in the CBD, one in Fitzroy, and another in Armadale, plus two more in Brisbane. Beyond traditional croissants, Lune serves danishes, cruffins, morning buns, and TBs, or twice-baked croissants.

What to order: You can’t go wrong with the seasonal flavors, either savory or sweet, which in recent months have included a blueberry juniper cruffin and a danish inspired by the apricot pizza at Italy’s Pepe in Grani, made with apricot and cider compote, buffalo ricotta, crushed roasted hazelnuts, and dehydrated black olive crumb.

Tip: For something more extravagant, book the Lune Lab experience, a croissant tasting menu served in the Fitzroy location at a private bar overlooking “The Cube,” the futuristic, climate-controlled pastry kitchen.

Melbourne is incredibly diverse, which makes it difficult to decide which international cuisine to try for any given meal. The Queen Victoria Market has been a welcome solution for the indecisive since it opened in 1878. Today, it sprawls over 17 acres and ranks as the largest open-air market in the Southern Hemisphere, with stalls dedicated to Japanese sandwiches (Meet Sando), Sri Lankan street food (Drums Cafe), Australian-made cheeses (Ripe Cheese), Turkish pastries (The Borek Shop), Indonesian comfort food (Kenangan), Spanish churros (Spanish Donut Van), and much, much more. You could easily spend all day snacking here.

What to order: If you want to learn as you eat, join in the two-hour Ultimate Foodie Tour, which is offered at 10 a.m. on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. Along the way, you’ll sample produce, meet market vendors, and sample seasonal bites like Coffin Bay oysters, grilled kangaroo, pickled octopus, and hot jam doughnuts from the American Doughnut Kitchen, which has operated out of a bus outside since 1950 and is famous for its monstrous (but worth it!) queues.

With all that’s trendy and exciting going on in the Melbourne food scene, it’s easy to ignore the tried-and-true. Not to be missed, however, is a good old-fashioned Aussie pub (often called a “hotel”). Locals swear by the Marquis of Lorne, a three-story landmark that opened its doors in Fitzroy in 1873. Over the years, the menu has gotten a bit chefier, but you can still find classics like chicken schnitzel (nicknamed a “schnitty” here), slow-cooked lamb shoulder, and a fried rockling fish burger. And the more creative inventions on the menu should be classics: Think king prawns with fried paella rice cakes and confit chicken wingettes with pickled kohlrabi and black garlic caramel.

What to order: Be sure to check out the extensive wine list (including some funky skin contacts and chilled reds) and the selection of unique beers on tap, which are best enjoyed on the rooftop at sunset. You’ll find a number of beers brewed right here in the Melbourne area at spots like Deeds Brewing, Molly Rose Brewery, and Stomping Ground Brewery.