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The Best Cheesecakes in Melbourne to Try Right Now
From 100-year-old Polish classics to Basque bliss — these are the city's top spots for cheesecake lovers.
Cheesecake has survived the cupcake era, the cronut years and several thousand iterations of pistachio without needing much reinvention at all. Cream cheese, eggs, sugar, heat: get the fundamentals right and there are few better things to find waiting behind a bakery counter.
Melbourne, naturally, has taken this rather seriously. There are Basque cakes with blackened crowns and centres barely holding themselves together, Japanese versions light enough to wobble, a Polish recipe that has been made for more than a century, and enough pandan, hojicha, ube and yuzu to keep the purists arguing. These are the cheesecakes worth crossing town for.
Norma
There is something very Norma about sending out a Basque cheesecake after a table full of French bistro food and wine, then making it even more excessive with chocolate sauce. Chef Benjamin Tremblet has Alain Ducasse and Paul Bocuse kitchens on the CV, but the pleasure here is far less serious: a dark, almost sulky top, a centre that gives way under the fork, and warm chocolate sliding into every soft edge. It is the dessert equivalent of ordering one more glass because nobody is ready to go home yet.
197 Smith Street, Fitzroy
Dua Bakehouse
Raymond Tan has a useful disregard for pastry borders, and Dua Bakehouse gives that instinct plenty of room. Among the pandan princess cake, ube purin and shelves of shio pan, cheesecake keeps reappearing in different clothes: a clean, creamy New York classic, yuzu sharpened with citrus, strawberry dressed for summer. They belong naturally to the same Collingwood Yards spread, part Stockholm bakery, part Southeast Asian sweet shop, entirely Raymond Tan.
Collingwood Yards, Shop 1/35 Johnston Street, Collingwood
Lemon and Butter
French pastry chef Julie has made Degraves Street a very good place to lose five minutes and leave holding cake. At Lemon and Butter, canelés, madeleines, flan and tarts jostle for attention, but the lemon Basque deserves its own detour. Lemon curd cuts a bright, tart line through all that cream cheese, leaving each forkful richer, sharper and considerably harder to share. Espresso-vanilla and pistachio appear too, but lemon is the one to remember.
Degraves Street, Melbourne
Mietta by Rosemary
Rosemary Andrews has cooked at Attica Summer Camp, The Ledbury and Dinner by Heston, but Mietta by Rosemary is where her cheesecake brain gets particularly interesting. The Vanilla Bean Basque uses three dairies and a serious quantity of real vanilla, landing somewhere between custard, cream and cake without slipping into goo. Dulcey chocolate goes nutty and caramel-like; pandan with white chocolate heads somewhere greener and sweeter. Start with vanilla. It needs far less embellishment than most desserts would dare.
23 Glenferrie Road, Malvern
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Her Little Patisserie
Her Little Patisserie is for the very specific moment when dinner is finished, nobody wants another drink, and cheesecake suddenly feels like the only sensible next move. Its Queen Street counter stays lit into the evening with neat rounds of vanilla bean, matcha, Biscoff and Oreo Basque, sold by the slice or whole. The vanilla is clean and milky, the matcha more bitter-edged; both suit being eaten late, coat still on, plans for an earlier bedtime pleasantly abandoned.
Suite 1/221 Queen Street, Melbourne
Good Measure
Good Measure changes character as the day goes on: Mont Blancs and sandwiches in the morning, vinyl and Guinness after dark, the magpie on the wall presiding over all of it. Happily, the $10 matcha Basque belongs to both versions. Ceremonial matcha runs through the cake with enough bitterness to keep the sweetness in check. Order the matcha float with coconut sorbet alongside and the table becomes a lovely study in green.
193 Lygon Street, Carlton
BAKT
BAKT has a cheesecake menu built for people who like their favourites with a detour. Pandan, Thai milk tea, ube and pistachio sit alongside Vietnamese coffee, strawberry-pistachio, Raffaello and the wonderfully specific Matcha-Nana, with fresh specials arriving each month. These are pre-order cakes rather than impulse buys, collected from Caroline Springs or the CBD on selected dates. The hard part is narrowing the box down before another flavour appears.
Order online
Karomi
Karomi has one obsession and Werribee is better for it. The late-night dessert shop deals almost entirely in hulking slices of San Sebastián cheesecake, with pistachio and raspberry, ube, crème brûlée and brownie versions joining the original. Then come the sauces: warm Belgian chocolate or pistachio poured over the top at the table until restraint becomes largely theoretical. The queues make much more sense once one of those enormous wedges lands in front of you.
Shop 15/1 Duncans Road, Werribee
Back Alley Bakes
The pink roller door is the first clue that Back Alley Bakes is not your standard neighbourhood bakery. What began in Gabriel Alonso and Alana Trevisan’s Preston garage now draws regular queues to a Coburg North industrial pocket, and amid the morning buns, danishes and excellent crois-sauso, the Basque cheesecake has become a constant. Darkly scorched on top, pale and almost fluffy within, it’s gluten-free and surprisingly light for a slice of such formidable proportions.
10 Leslie Avenue, Coburg North
La Colmena
Former computer engineer Cristina Jiménez opened La Colmena to give Spain’s lesser-known pastry traditions a Melbourne address. Her Menorcan childhood turns up in ensaïmadas, alongside piononos, xuixos and recipes gathered from across the country, but the Basque cheesecake has become a Prahran Market fixation of its own. Its near-black caramelisation carries a slight bitterness before giving way to a rich, custard-soft centre; no sauces, toppings or clever distraction required. Just bring a fork with some structural integrity.
Stall 120A, Prahran Market, 163 Commercial Road, South Yarra
Lulu & me
At Lulu & me Cheesecakes, Basque is treated more like mortadella than cake. Taste the traditional and pandan first, gesture towards the size of slab required, then watch it cut, weighed and folded into butcher’s paper. The pandan uses fresh leaves, while elsewhere Michael Diamandis and twin pastry chefs Dilu and Jini Kulathungam get clever with a New York cheesecake on a messmate-eucalyptus biscuit base and Japanese soufflé. Whole traditional Basques come with orange, peppercorn and bay-leaf syrup for the trip home.
1-5 Hotham Street, Collingwood
LeTAO
LeTAO had already sold more than 25 million Double Fromages before Melbourne got its own Swanston Street shop, so there was little need for an introduction. The Hokkaido cheesecake is a neat bit of dairy geography: Australian cream cheese baked below, Italian mascarpone and Hokkaido cream above, all hidden beneath fine yellow crumb meant to resemble Hokkaido snow. Chocolat, strawberry and melon versions move through the range, but the original is still the cake people carry out of the store.
238 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Tori’s
At Tori’s, Basque cheesecake has wandered a fair distance from San Sebastián. The Niagara Lane bakery takes its cues from Korea, with ube and matcha regularly colouring the slices purple and green beside Japanese shortcakes, madeleines and whatever else has arrived from the kitchen that morning. The especially Tori’s move is to build a whole cake from eight different slices, an edible patchwork for anyone constitutionally incapable of choosing just one. Iced strawberry matcha alongside, obviously.
28 Niagara Lane, Melbourne
Better Burnt
Kai Yee Ho took an unusual route to Better Burnt: a master’s in chemical engineering, training at William Angliss and time at Lune before Basque cheesecake took over. Her tiny Hawthorn shop now works through around 15 flavours, putting only six or seven out each day and encouraging a taste before choosing. Hojicha, yuzu, pandan, black sesame and genmaicha might appear, but the Original has outsold them all since day one. Apparently no amount of novelty beats getting the first one right.
817 Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn
KumoKumo
KumoKumo has made The Strand easier to spot: follow the orange boxes and the people waiting for cheesecake. The Chinese-born bakery specialises in Japanese-style cakes with a springy, fine-crumbed texture, including its large original, smaller flavoured numbers and little half-baked cheesecakes made for eating straight from the box. Curiously, the original hides raisins along its base, a tiny old-school detail beneath all that internet-famous wobble.
250 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne
Only Cheesecake
Akira Toyama began Only Cheesecake during lockdown, baking from Papirica in Collingwood, when devoting oneself almost entirely to one cake made a certain kind of sense. Hers are Basque by way of Japan, less sweet and pulled in sharper directions: hojicha brings roast and tannin, yuzu cuts cleanly through the dairy, while miso and sesame add salt, nuttiness and a savoury edge. She still makes the cakes to order from Papirica, whole and wonderfully singular.
Sitchu Tip: The hojicha is still our pick, all roasted-tea depth against that soft dairy centre.
Morning Market
Morning Market has a way of turning a trip for bread into flowers, excellent tomatoes, something from the deli and three jars now apparently necessary for dinner. Somewhere among it all is the cake Morning Market calls its most sought-after: a Basque cheesecake made in-house with vanilla, lemon and orange, the citrus running right through the cream cheese rather than sitting politely on top. It is rich, yes, but bright with it, and very easy to justify once the Baker Bleu loaf is already in the bag.
Sitchu Tip: Ordering the whole thing? The 20cm cake feeds six to eight and needs to be booked by 3pm two days ahead.
59 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy
579 High Street, Prahran
Bola Bake
Behind the roller door of an Airport West warehouse, Bola Bake is doing things with cake that make the industrial setting feel almost beside the point. Chef-owner Mini Punapaprasurt bakes shokupan, serves squid-ink mentaiko and pours Dirty Rose lattes, while the ube Basque cheesecake lands in the middle of it all in a vivid shade of purple. The yam gives the cream cheese a mellow, earthy sweetness with a faint nuttiness underneath; taro and yuzu have had their turns too.
22A Fraser Street, Airport West
Monarch Cakes
While Melbourne has spent the past few years poking cheesecakes to see if they wobble, Monarch Cakes has carried on baking the same Polish version it has known since 1931. Pearl Levine brought the recipe from Poland, first making it in Carlton before Monarch moved to Acland Street three years later. There is no gooey centre here: Gippsland cottage cheese, lemon, a firm crumb and almost a century of muscle memory. Eat it beneath the old photographs, Art Deco lights and mint-green scales and the whole shop clicks into place.
103 Acland Street, St Kilda
Still hungry? Keep exploring Melbourne’s best bakeries and sweet spots with our guides to the city’s best new cafes and best bagel shops, plus plenty more places worth crossing town for.
