The best restaurants, coffee bars and bars in Melbourne

Tomato slices of various colors and sizes were piled on bread, one falling into the other like drunken buddies. Taken together, their taste was syrupy-sour. They had an exuberant late summer density. Robust accompaniments intensified each bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and pickled, fried shallot flecks.

And that smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh, removed from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and pounded into butter. It took a second for my jetlagged palate to register brine instead. Green olive tapenade.

I should have known that Besha Rodell – chief restaurant critic for the city's The Age newspaper and one of my closest friends for 20 years – wouldn't give me the cliché of avocado toast as my first impression of Australia straight from Melbourne airport. I would quickly understand that Melbourne's culinary offering, like the city I live in, cannot easily be pigeonholed. It is far more a mosaic than a monolith.

Florian, where we ate, sits downstairs in a two-story Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic part of the city's inner Carlton North suburb. The occupied spaces exuded a hipness that reflected what I had heard about Melbourne's famous café culture. But the market-driven menu, including pastries full of roasted plums and finger lime pearls, dodged easy definitions. My guide for the next two weeks is the nuanced first impression the whole thing would leave.

Besha was the last restaurant critic at LA Weekly from 2012 to 2017 before returning to Melbourne, her hometown. When she was 14, she left Australia with her family and went to the United States. For almost a decade since we returned, we talked about me visiting her.

In March 2025, I finally showed up in Australia's southernmost mainland city, partly to check out the festivities surrounding the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and mostly to enjoy as much of the city as possible with the amazing culinary soulmate of my life.

Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively researched, fantasy and the reality that awaits you. Already on the drive between the airport pick-up lane and Florian, I realized that I had never been to a place that I had imagined so intensely through someone else's experience.

I had imagined Besha as a girl walking the high, crowded halls of Queen Victoria Market, eating a mustard-slathered bratwurst while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times she had repeated to me the most prescient parts of Melbourne's history in relation to food culture. In the 1830s, the British colonized this area, where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what is known as Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian gold rush accelerated the city's growth and population less than 20 years later. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for champagne. In contrast, pubs have served a wide range of society for generations, so eating out at affordable prices is second nature to many Melbourne residents. She had often spoken about Melbourne's genuine hospitality, a career for warm-hearted people who lived their work as a calling rather than a subservient job they loathed.

Besha also knew the premise that would ultimately land me on a Qantas flight: like Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne's modern culinary moment rests on the immigrant communities that have been rooted in the city since its founding. The similarities and differences in the origins of these communities between the two cities make Melbourne's culinary fabric both inherently familiar to Angelenos and something very special to experience.

We threw ourselves into a mad whirlwind of eating and drinking for two weeks, starting with the basics.

My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old Cantonese gourmet institution. The room exudes mid-century glamor, right down to the red carpet and generously placed tables, which ensure quietness in the room and private conversations. The Peking duck, which arrived already wrapped in clear packaging with carefully cracked skin and hoisin-flecked meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that won me over. I had never eaten pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia that consists of the pearl oyster's adductor muscle attached to the iridescent shell. Its qualities span the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. The waiters recommended mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory sweetness that rivaled the rich Macau-style curry-coconut sauce in which it was baked.

The next day, between several stops, I held a slice of Pizza Capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a street table at the University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian business when a post-World War II wave of immigrants arrived with their love of strong coffee and, as technology shapes societies, recent advances in commercial espresso machines.

Prosciutto, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally top a capricciosa, which is said to have originated in Rome in the 1950s as a “cleaning the fridge” cake. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians despise its existence because of the cheap ingredients that characterized early Australian versions. Besha is passionate about the local value of the capricciosa, especially when prepared with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham like here.

A routine for our everyday life began to take shape. Besha, who had first introduced me to macchiato 15 years ago but lacked the taste for expressive infusions that I had cultivated since moving to LA, left me to my morning coffee excursions. We met for lunch, maybe stopped by a second location, gave ourselves a few hours to ourselves, met at a bar for a cocktail or a glass of wine, and then had dinner. Then sometimes go to a different restaurant or end the evening at a different bar.

At Serai, a high-end Filipino restaurant tucked away in an alley in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation of kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminds me of the lean, slightly gamey venison my uncle hunted when I was a child.

Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable against the US dollar), pepper dishes made with local ingredients: rosy bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants flavored with citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a famous First Nations restaurant, was closed the week I arrived; This was my closest experience with indigenous cuisine.

Martinis transitioned to dishes of earthy, savory pasta dishes. A Lebanese breakfast led to a lunch of beautifully lumpy crab meat with fried potato cakes at the Builders Arms Hotel, one of the fancier pubs, and a dinner of French cuisine at an underrated restaurant called Malin. My first encounter with the beautifully fused flavors of Mauritian cuisine was at a place called Manzé, which I wish I could transport to Southern California with the tenderness of the rotis and the scent of mustard seeds and pumpkin-infused curry leaves.

We adventured to a meditative Korean restaurant in a wooded town 40 miles east of Melbourne and down the Mornington Peninsula to a brand new luminary called Barragunda Dining on a working farm, where we tasted autumn right outside the window in the concentrated tomatoes, charred yellow peppers, stone fruits and figs.

Like Los Angeles, there is no clear description of the food in Melbourne. “Miscellaneous” barely covers it. You just give in to curiosity and constantly ask, “What else? Who else?”

The biggest surprise that stuck with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulation of Greek cuisine.

The noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building opposite the city's Victorian Parliament building, reminded me of my only trip to Athens, a dozen years ago.

Intriguing liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat weaves its way through moussaka and meals end with a perfectly paired feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim's Greek Tavern, a restaurant. Besha has been going there almost all her life. Customers do not receive a menu at Jim's. It's a conversation about what you want to eat – dips? Lamb gyros? The Pacific blueeye that's freshest today? – That might be closer to a negotiation.

I accompanied Besha there for Sunday dinner with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The food had a lemon-garlic flavor, but in the noise of the room I momentarily lost my “traveler” mantle. I remembered by heart how the whole family made the 15-minute walk from Besha's house to the restaurant. I now noticed that her body was relaxing, her laughter was brightening, and she was happy to eat large forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her in Melbourne. I looked home.