Best Eats in Melbourne and Yarra Valley
Two very different meals define a Melbourne base trip: the city’s genuinely multicultural everyday food scene, and a cellar-door lunch out in the Yarra Valley once you’ve earned a day away from the CBD. Here’s how to eat well on both halves of the trip.
Melbourne’s coffee culture
Lygon Street in Carlton is credited as the birthplace of Australia’s espresso culture, and Pellegrini’s, open since 1954, is still the historic espresso bar to know. Order like a local: a flat white, generally described as an “Australasian” invention rather than a Melbourne exclusive, or a short black if you want it simple.
Eat by neighbourhood, not by restaurant list
Richmond’s Victoria Street is Melbourne’s “Little Saigon,” a strip of Vietnamese restaurants worth working into an evening. Lygon Street itself carries the city’s Italian dining, and the Lonsdale Street precinct anchors the largest Greek population of any city outside Greece. Chinatown, on Little Bourke Street and the oldest continuously operating Chinatown in the Western world, is the spot for yum cha.
Two dishes worth trying
The pub parma, a chicken parmigiana, is standard pub food across the city. The dim sim, a fried or steamed snack invented in Melbourne around 1945, is not the same thing as Cantonese dim sum, worth knowing before you order expecting one and get the other.
Queen Victoria Market
Running since 1878, Queen Victoria Market is the obvious lunch stop for produce stalls and casual food, plus seasonal Night Markets that add a different, later crowd to the same space. It sits easily inside a half day, and pairs naturally with a laneway coffee stop either side of the visit.
South Melbourne and Prahran markets
If Queen Victoria Market feels like the one everyone already knows, South Melbourne Market and Prahran Market both run smaller, quieter versions of the same produce-and-casual-food format, worth a look if you’re staying closer to Southbank or Chapel Street than the CBD proper.
Beyond the CBD: a Yarra Valley lunch
About 1 hour 15 minutes out, the Yarra Valley’s cellar doors pair wine tastings with a proper sit-down lunch, a different pace entirely from a city food crawl. If you have a few extra hours, Healesville Sanctuary sits nearby for wildlife before or after the meal.
Tipping
Tipping is not expected or customary anywhere in Australia; a menu price is the actual price.
Read more: our best places to stay guide covers which neighbourhood puts you closest to this food scene, and the Melbourne, Australia guide covers the whole trip.
One concrete tip: book the Yarra Valley cellar-door lunch ahead on weekends, the popular tables fill days in advance during peak season.