Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all of your summer travel, near and far.
Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Sliced tomatoes in several shades and sizes had been piled onto bread, one falling into the other like drunk pals. Combined, their flavor was syrupy-tart. They had a bursting, late summer density. Potent garnishes intensified every bite: dark anchovy fillets, reedy tarragon leaves and flecks of pickled, fried shallots.
And the smooth, green puree oozing out from underneath the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar Hass avocado flesh extracted from its wrinkled, purplish-black skin and smashed to butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to instead register brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
I should have known that, straight from Melbourne Airport, Besha Rodell — chief restaurant critic for the city’s daily newspaper, the Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years — wouldn’t feed me the cliche of avocado toast as my first taste of Australia. I’d soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne’s culinary framework can’t be easily pigeonholed. It’s far more mosaic than monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, sits at the bottom of a two-story, Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city’s Carlton North inner suburb. Its lived-in rooms relayed a hipness that echoed what I’d heard about Melbourne’s famous cafe culture. But the market-centered menu, including pastries overflowing with roasted plum and finger lime pearls, dodged simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks well understood the nuanced first impression it all would make.
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Besha had been the last staff restaurant critic at L.A. Weekly, from 2012 to 2017, before moving back to Melbourne, her hometown. She’d initially left Australia for the United States with her family when she was 14. Since returning, we’d been talking about me coming to see her for nearly a decade.
I showed up finally in Australia’s southernmost mainland city in March 2025, timed partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with my life’s great dining soulmate.
The sidewalk crowd at Florian restaurant located in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Carlton North.
(Bill Addison )
Traveling to any place for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited, perhaps exhaustively research-fed imagination and the reality that awaits. I understood even in the drive between the airport’s pickup lane and Florian that I’d never been anywhere I’d so intensely pre-visualized through another person’s experience.
I had pictured Besha walking through the tall, crammed halls of Queen Victoria Market as a girl, eating a bratwurst smeared with mustard while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, she’d repeated the most prescient bits of Melbourne’s history to me as it related to the dining culture. In the 1830s the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be named Port Phillip Bay. A Victorian-era gold rush less than 20 years later hastened the city’s growth and population. The influx of wealth encouraged an early taste for Champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered to a broad swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out affordably as a matter of course. She’d talked often about the sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for warm-natured people who live the work as a calling and not a servile gig they resent.
Bratwurst from the Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would finally get me on a Qantas flight: As with Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne’s modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have rooted in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne’s culinary fabric both innately familiar to Angelenos, and also something wholly distinct to experience.
We dove into a mad, two-week whirl of eating and drinking, starting with fundamentals.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old, fine-dining Cantonese institution. The room is engulfing in its mid-century glamour, down to the red carpet and lavishly spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. Peking duck, arriving already bound in translucent wrappers with meticulous slivers of crackling skin and hoisin-dappled meat, was lovely, but it was the seafood that landed me. I’d never had pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its qualities spanned the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. Servers suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, savory-sweetness that could handle the richness of the Macau-style curried coconut sauce in which it was baked.
At Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a serving of pearl meat, the delicacy farmed in Western Australia and made of pearl oyster adductor muscle that attaches to its iridescent shell. Its flavor bridges scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The next day, amid several stops, I held a slice of pizza capricciosa in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at University Cafe on Lygon Street, an early epicenter of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchants for strong coffee and — as technology has a way of shaping societies — recent advancements in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally crown a capricciosa, supposedly originating in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean the fridge” pie. In the age of Neapolitan worship, some Melburnians disdain its existence for the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelistic about the capricciosa’s local worth, especially when composed with fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham as it was here.
A routine to our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn’t have the taste for ultra-expressive pour-overs I’d nurtured since moving to L.A., would leave me to my morning coffee jaunts. We’d meet for lunch, maybe swing by a second place, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant, or finish at another bar.
At Serai, a star Filipino restaurant hidden down a laneway in the Central Business District, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its taste reminded me of the lean, faintly gamy venison my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the capricciosa pizza at University City; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia remains quite favorable to the U.S. dollar), peppers courses with Indigenous ingredients: raisiny bush tomatoes, macadamias, green ants that taste of citrus and coriander. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; this was my closest experience of Indigenous cooking.
Martinis would segue to meals of earthy, saucy pastas. A Lebanese breakfast led to lunch of beautifully lumpy spanner crab meat with fried potato cakes at Builders Arms Hotel, one of the tonier pubs, and a dinner of cerebral French cooking at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously conflated flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, in the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves infused with pumpkin, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We went on adventures 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, set on a working farm where, in the concentrated tomatoes and charred yellow peppers and stone fruit and figs, we tasted summer turning to fall right outside the window.
As with Los Angeles, there is no tidy way to sum up eating in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give yourself over to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A spread of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise that stayed with me from Melbourne was the excellence and articulations of Greek cuisine.
The blasts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city’s Victorian-era Parliament House, ricocheted my brain to my one trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat laces through moussaka, and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheesecake. Then there was Jim’s Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to nearly her whole life. Customers receive no menu at Jim’s. It’s a conversation about what you want to eat — dips? Lamb gyro? The Pacific blue-eye fish that’s freshest today? — that’s maybe closer to a negotiation.
I joined Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The meal was a lemony, garlicky blur, but in the roar of the room, my mantle as “traveler” fell away for just a minute. I thought of how the whole family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha’s house to the restaurant from rote memory. I noted now an easing in her frame and a lighter ring to her laugh, and her happiness taking big forkfuls of stretchy saganaki. I saw her Melbourne. I saw home.
Inside Jim’s Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)
