a big group

Destination · Cantonese fine dining · CBD · $$$$

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Gilbert Lau opened Flower Drum in 1975 and made it Melbourne's benchmark for Cantonese fine dining, and in the restaurant's 50th year the 2026 Good Food Guide (The Age) named it Restaurant of the Year.

Destination · Greek taverna (BYO) · Collingwood · $$

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There is no menu to read. A waiter looks over your table, decides what you should be eating, and the food starts arriving.

Solid · Pan-Asian · CBD · $$$

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Andrew McConnell put a New England lobster roll on the opening menu at 180 Flinders Lane in early 2014, and it has never come off.

Solid · Natural wine bar · Fitzroy · $$$

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Roughly fifteen wines sit open at any one time, drawn from a list of about two hundred bins bought direct from independent growers.

Solid · Gastropub · Fitzroy · $$$

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The fish pot pie was taken off the menu once and put straight back, and Time Out's five-star review says the removal "almost caused a Fitzroy riot."

Solid · Laneway/container bar · CBD · $

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Maz Salt took a one-year lease on a Chinatown carpark in March 2006, cut a hole in a shipping container for a bar and stacked pallets for seats. The lease is twenty years old now.

Solid · Cocktail bar · Fitzroy · $$

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They kept the old brass bar and its timber panelling because timber resonates, then dropped the ceiling for soundproofing, and built the room around a vintage Tannoy.

Solid · Gin & martini bar · CBD · $$$

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" The martini comes to your table rather than the bar, poured cold at 90ml.

Solid · Craft brewery · Collingwood · $$

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The first beer Nic Sandery sold, in 2017, was a smoked Japanese dark lager brewed with seaweed, and it is still in the range.

Solid · Craft brewery · Abbotsford · $$

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Four serving tanks stand along the back wall and some of the beer goes from tank to glass without ever being put in a keg.

Solid · Historic pub · Fitzroy · $$

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Kangaroo is Australia's original protein, eaten on this continent for tens of thousands of years, and it's still hard to find cooked well because it's so lean that most kitchens run it to gray.

Solid · Middle Eastern · CBD · $$$$

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The lamb shoulder has survived a group split, a refit that painted the room black, and fifteen years of its chef being on television, and The Age Good Food Guide still calls it the bedrock of the whole business.

Solid · Craft beer & dining hall · Brunswick East · $$

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A ten-hectolitre brewhouse runs along one wall of the room, and the beer it was built for is Village Pils, an Italian-style pilsner brewed for this street and nowhere else.

Listed · Corner pub · Fitzroy · $$

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When Matt Vero and Steve Rowley took over a pub that had stood on the corner of George and Kerr for more than 150 years, Broadsheet reported the decision plainly: they "decided not to turn…

Listed · Neighbourhood cocktail bar · CBD · $$

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Ben Cester opened it because nowhere else on that stretch would take a walk-in group with thirty minutes before a dinner booking.

Listed · Riverside beer garden · South Wharf · $$

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The Boatbuilders Yard drinks under the masts of the Polly Woodside, the old tall ship moored for good at South Wharf, filling an original maritime shed three to five minutes on foot from the MCEC doors.

Listed · Cocktail and wine bar · Brunswick East · $$$

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The bar's own site tells you to order a pizza from up the road and bring it in, which is the clearest statement anyone has made about what this place is for.

Listed · Thai · CBD · $$

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Every week the kitchen picks about seven thousand bunches of coriander, Thai basil and Vietnamese mint by hand, because a machine bruises them.

Listed · Shanghainese dumplings · CBD · $$

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HuTong has folded xiao long bao down a Market Lane laneway in Chinatown since 2008, and the soup dumplings are the reason the line forms.

Listed · Thai · CBD · $$

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A critic who gave it four stars said the kitchen refuses to soften the chilli for local palates, and meant it as praise.

Listed · Riverside gastropub · South Wharf · $$

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The General Assembly is "the only venue outside the brewery itself to stock all of the Matilda Bay beers on tap," per Concrete Playground, a riverside pub a two-minute walk from the MCEC.

Listed · Gastropub · South Melbourne · $$

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The Wayside Inn cooks premium steaks over red gum woodfire grills and runs a rotisserie that changes daily, Boer goat on Monday, suckling pig on Friday, a short hop from the MCEC in South Melbourne.

Listed · Italian (fresh pasta) · CBD · $$$

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Head chef Geoff Martin kept one dish when Marameo took over this Russell Place laneway address from Sarti in November 2019, a squid-ink spaghetti with blue swimmer crab, fresh tomato and chili.

Listed · Thai · South Wharf · $$

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BangPop cooks Isaan street food on the South Wharf promenade, a few minutes' walk from the MCEC, and Time Out scored it four out of five.

Listed · Modern Chinese · CBD · $$$

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A ruyi is a talisman meaning "as you wish".

Listed · Historic pub · CBD · $$

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The last time anybody published a judgment on the food or the beer here was January 2011. Everything written since has been about the painting.

Listed · Thai / beer hall · CBD · $$

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Nobody agrees how much beer is up here. The venue says up to 80 at a time, Time Out says 200, and no independent count exists.

Listed · Craft beer hall · CBD · $$

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The Mercat Cross Hotel stood on the corner of Queen and Therry for generations and now carries a brewery's name, after a 700-square-metre renovation inside a $450 million redevelopment of the Munro site.

Listed · Craft beer · Footscray · $

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Four of the taps are Lukr side-pulls with a wider bore than a normal faucet, so the pilsner comes out under a dense creamy head instead of a thin one.

Listed · Malaysian beer hall · CBD · $$

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Junda Khoo opened the first Ho Jiak in Sydney in 2014, then built a three-level Malaysian complex at 235 Bourke Street and put a beer hall on the top floor.

Listed · Lebanese wood-fired pizza · Thornbury · $$

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The kitchen's own word for what it makes is inauthentic pizza, and it means manoushe, the Lebanese round, and the long boat-shaped pide.

Listed · Irish gastropub · CBD · $$

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They churn the butter, bake the bread, cure the meat and smoke the fish on site, which is not what an Irish pub has to do.

Listed · Wine / cocktails · Brunswick East · $$

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Old listings sell this as a craft beer and whisky bar. The venue's own words are wine, cocktails and Sicilian food sent over from Bar Idda.

Listed · Craft brewery / pizza · Clifton Hill · $$

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They rescue surplus bread and brew with it, so part of the grain bill has already been through a bakery once.

Listed · Waterfront pub · South Wharf · $$

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The bar runs to 10pm Monday to Thursday and the kitchen stops at nine, which is the single most useful thing anyone has published about this pub and the reason it is worth knowing before a conference dinner runs long.

Listed · Italian / cocktails · CBD · $$

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The room upstairs at 43 Hardware Lane was a social club for city workers in the 1920s, and it took two childhood friends from Verona to put a kitchen back in it.

Listed · Craft brewery · South Melbourne · $$

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It started in 2016 on a 500-litre Braumeister, which is a very good homebrew rig rather than a brewery, because Casey Wagner wanted the West Coast beers he had grown up drinking in America.