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Five Tasmanian Venues Named in 50 Best Discovery 2026
From a ten-seat kaiseki counter in Hobart to seven suites above a Launceston flour mill, five Tasmanian restaurants and hotels have joined 50 Best Discovery.
Omotenashi and Templo in Hobart, The Agrarian Kitchen in New Norfolk, The Tasman on the waterfront and Seven Rooms at Stillwater in Launceston have joined the latest 50 Best Discovery guide.
The five names sketch a particularly Tasmanian vision of hospitality: small rooms, old buildings with new purpose, food kept close to its source and service that feels generous without becoming formal. Here, abundance is measured in warm bread, a ten-seat counter, blackwood cupboards stocked with local cheese and a garden dictating the shape of lunch.
50 Best Discovery is not a ranked top-50 list, but an expert-selected global guide shaped by votes from the academies behind The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Bars and Hotels. Venues cannot nominate themselves or pay for inclusion.
These are the five Tasmanian places now carrying that international seal of approval.
Omotenashi
Hobart contains a great deal behind unassuming doors, but Omotenashi may have the most arresting reveal of all. Hidden beyond a Lexus showroom on Elizabeth Street, the ten-seat restaurant conducts a deeply considered kaiseki dinner using Japanese tradition and Tasmanian ingredients. Seafood from the island’s cold waters appears with the clarity and restraint the format demands, each course prepared and explained across the counter as the evening slowly gathers meaning.
The restaurant’s name refers to wholehearted hospitality, an idea expressed here through precision rather than performance. Only ten guests are seated each evening, allowing every pour, plate and pause to receive its due attention.
Sitchu Tip: Dinner is $350 per person, including welcome sake and tea. The experience can accommodate some pescatarian, low-gluten and low-dairy requests, but not vegetarian, vegan or coeliac diets, so any requirements must be discussed before booking.
4/160 Elizabeth Street, Hobart
Templo
Templo makes a compelling case for restaurants that do not require a lobby, dress code or soaring dining room to feel significant. The Patrick Street address seats just 25, divided between close-set tables, stools and the large communal table that has long been part of its appeal. Bare brick surrounds a daily-changing set menu shaped by seasonal Tasmanian produce, with an Italian sensibility running through the kitchen rather than sitting heavily on top of it.
Dinner might move through vegetables treated with unusual care, house-made pasta, a piece of fish or meat and something sweet, although part of Templo’s charm lies in surrendering the specifics. You book, sit and eat what the day has allowed.
Sitchu Tip: The current set menu is $100, supported by minimal-intervention wines from small producers. Diners can also bring a bottle for $30 corkage, a civilised policy that deserves international recognition of its own. Templo opens for dinner from Wednesday to Sunday.
98 Patrick Street, Hobart
The Agrarian Kitchen
At The Agrarian Kitchen, lunch begins before anybody reaches the dining room. Guests first enter the greenhouse in the garden behind the old Bronte building at Willow Court. More than 90 per cent of the ingredients used across the menu are grown on site, making the walk through beds, orchards and glasshouses an introduction to the meal rather than a decorative preamble.
Inside, head chef Sam Smith and the kitchen team turn that harvest into a three-hour study of the season. Cheese is made, animals are butchered whole, bread is baked and ingredients are smoked, fermented, preserved or sent through the wood fire. The techniques are old, but the plates never feel trapped in reverence.
Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet began The Agrarian Kitchen as a cooking school and farm in 2008 before opening the New Norfolk restaurant in 2017. It has since grown to include its kitchen garden, classes and outdoor kiosk, yet the central proposition remains beautifully direct: understand the land, then cook from it.
Sitchu Tip: The set lunch currently costs $220 per person, increasing to $240 from September 2026.
Need to Know: In 2024, it became the first Tasmanian venue to win Gourmet Traveller’s Restaurant of the Year.
11a The Avenue, New Norfolk
Seven Rooms at Stillwater
Seven Rooms at Stillwater understands the deep pleasure of finishing dinner and discovering your bed is only one floor away. The suites sit above Stillwater restaurant inside Ritchies Mill, the weathered 1840s flour mill beside kanamaluka/Tamar estuary that has housed the Launceston institution since 2000. Accommodation arrived in 2019, completing an experience that now moves seamlessly from local produce and Tasmanian wine downstairs to timber beams, thick stone walls and river views above.
There are only seven rooms, each carrying a different trace of the building’s former life. Old milling wheels remain in one; another occupies the original miller’s cottage. Bespoke blackwood pantries are filled with local drinks and provisions, Tasmanian artwork hangs against darkened timber and breakfast waits in-room, including freshly baked croissants.
The seventh suite is the largest, with a private courtyard, accessible design and permission for four-legged guests. The scale is closer to staying in the beautifully appointed home of a host with exceptional taste than entering a conventional hotel, and that is why it resonates so distinctly.
Stillwater remains the beating heart. After more than 25 years, chef Craig Will’s restaurant continues to interpret northern Tasmania through its farmers, fishers, distillers and winemakers. Seven Rooms simply allows the evening to end without breaking the spell.
2 Bridge Road, Launceston
Book your stay with Booking.com
Book lunch or dinner at Stillwater
The Tasman
The Tasman occupies the grander end of this small-island story, though its deepest pleasures still lie in detail. The 152-room waterfront hotel joins three distinct architectural periods: an 1840s Georgian building, an Art Deco wing and the contemporary glass Pavilion. Moving through it can feel like crossing decades without leaving the block. Heritage rooms preserve vaulted doors, sandstone and, in some cases, original fireplaces. Curved windows and rich materials define the Deco rooms, while the Pavilion looks directly across Hobart’s harbour through floor-to-ceiling glass.
Tasmania remains present inside the scale of the hotel. Native timbers, local artwork and island-made amenities soften the international polish, while Peppina draws on Massimo Mele’s Italian heritage and relationships with Tasmanian producers. Mary Mary handles the later hours with local spirits, native ingredients and a formidable drinks library.
This is not The Tasman’s first encounter with 50 Best. It placed No.49 in The World’s 50 Best Hotels in 2024, making its presence in Discovery an extension of an established global reputation rather than an introduction.
12 Murray Street, Hobart
Book your stay with Booking.com
Tasmania’s five selections move from ten seats to 152 rooms, from a former car-showroom annex to a riverside flour mill. What connects them is neither aesthetic nor price point, but the conviction that each experience could belong nowhere else. The world may have supplied the endorsement, but these places have always spoken fluent Tasmania.
Continue exploring the island through its extraordinary national parks, or make for Bicheno, a small east-coast town with an outsized hold on the heart.
