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Ballarat Has Crowned Its Best Pie, And It’s A Wagyu Reuben
The Shared Table has taken out Ballarat’s Best Pie 2026 with a rye-crusted beauty packed with braised Sher Wagyu, sauerkraut, cheese, pickles and all the airs of a very good deli sandwich.
Ballarat has spoken, the judges have eaten, and one formidable pastry parcel has emerged from the crumbs.
Buninyong restaurant The Shared Table has been crowned the winner of Ballarat’s Best Pie 2026 for its Sher Wagyu Reuben pie, defeating 29 sweet and savoury creations from bakeries, pubs, restaurants and cafes across the region.
This is no standard-issue bakery number. The winning pie takes the salty, tangy architecture of a classic Reuben sandwich and rebuilds it beneath a rye flour pastry lid, packing in locally sourced braised Sher Wagyu with pastrami flavours, sauerkraut, cheese, dressing and pickles. It also won Best Savoury Pie, securing both its category and the competition’s top honour.
The winners were announced at Itinerant Spirits on Saturday 1st August, with MasterChef Australia semi-finalist and Good Chef Bad Chef co-host Tim Bone leading the judging panel. He was joined by Herald Sun food and wine editor Kara Monssen, Melbourne chef Alejandro Saravia and veteran food writer Richard Cornish.
“To take home the crown among so many talented local bakers and businesses is an absolute dream come true,” says The Shared Table owner Dianne Ray. “Delicious and Surprising has been our motto since opening, as we’ve always strived to serve fine food with a twist, mixing and matching many types of cuisines, often landing in fusions that surprise and delight our customers. That’s how our spin on the Reuben was born.”
The Shared Table is known for looking beyond rigid culinary borders, and the winning pie is very much the restaurant in pastry form. It borrows from the New York deli, heads to a Victorian Wagyu producer for the filling, then wraps the lot in something that belongs firmly beside a paper bag and a winter afternoon.
“A huge amount of passion, hard work and the best of local ingredients went into crafting this pie, and our team couldn’t be prouder to share this win with the talented makers and producers in our community,” Ray says.
The Other Pies On The Podium
Second place went to Cookie Cult’s Struck Gold & It’s Sticky pie, available at Yellow Espresso, which also won Best Sweet Pie.
Its base is Cookie Cult’s signature chocolate chip cookie, topped with sticky date pudding, honey caramel and homemade vanilla custard, then sealed beneath a buttery pastry lid. Calling it a pie feels almost modest. It sounds closer to the dessert equivalent of emptying the good section of a bakery cabinet into a single tin.
The Buninyong Hotel took third place with its Sri Lankan chicken curry pie, made by the pub’s Sri Lankan-born chefs using a traditional blend of herbs, spices and house-made curry paste, all wrapped in golden pastry.
Sovereign Hill won Best Bakery Pie for its slow-cooked blade steak pepper pie, inspired by the food and flavours of the 1850s goldfields.
The award for Brilliantly Unexpected Pie went to Flying Chillies for its Pandan Flower pie, a layered creation of butter puff pastry, salted palm sugar caramel, pandan cheesecake, ube whipped white chocolate ganache and coconut mochi.
It was the competition’s most inventive sweet entry, stretching the definition of pie in the best possible way.
Thirty Pies, One Very Good Reason To Visit Ballarat
The competition does not end at the judging table. Throughout August, all 30 participating pies will remain available across Ballarat’s bakeries, restaurants, pubs, cafes and bars. The savoury field includes Craig’s Royal Hotel’s Korean galbi-jjim pie, Turret Bakehouse’s Ballarat beef short rib ragu pie, Tuki’s rainbow trout escabeche pie and Aunty Jacks’ chicken parma pie.
Elsewhere, Hop Temple has put a smoked cheeseburger inside pastry, Grainery Lane has paired yuzu and wasabi with chicken, Roy Hammond is serving a Korean beef hand pie, and Lola Ballarat has gone grand with its Surf & Turf Royale.
The sweet side is no less ambitious. Mondegreen Cafe has created an Off the Wagon ice cream pie, The George Hotel is serving a Filipino-inspired peach, mango and coconut number, while Every Little Crumb has paired chocolate and apple with miso caramel.
Sitchu Tip: Visitors can collect a printed Ballarat’s Best Pie map from the Ballarat Information Centre or download the digital version before plotting a route through the city.
Last year, more than 20,000 pies were sold during the campaign, directing plenty of butter-flecked business towards local venues, producers and makers. The public can also vote for the People’s Choice Pie by scanning the QR code at participating venues or voting online. Everyone who casts a vote will enter the draw to win a Ballarat escape for two valued at more than $1,200.
Voting closes on Monday 31st August, with the winner to be announced in early September.
Ballarat Is Attempting One Enormous Communal Pie Breakfast
The pastry-related ambition escalates again on Tuesday 4th August, when Ballarat will attempt to stage its largest gathering of people eating pies at the same time. From 6am, the public is invited to descend on Civic Hall for a free breakfast pie, live entertainment and a mass act of early-morning pastry consumption.
It is a very Ballarat proposition: community spirit, local pride and hot gravy before sunrise. After a month of pandan cheesecake pies and Wagyu Reubens in rye pastry, a mass breakfast pie feels like the only fitting send-off.
Ballarat’s Best Pie runs throughout August 2026, with the full map and People’s Choice voting available via Visit Ballarat. Planning a regional food escape? Continue through to our guide to Trentham and our edit of the best restaurants in regional Victoria.
