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The Best Restaurants in Regional Victoria Worth the Drive in 2026
Feast on everything our multi-faceted landscapes have to offer at these unforgettable restaurants in regional Victoria.
Regional Victoria does dining with a longer fuse. The produce arrives with dirt still clinging to its boots, the wine is often poured by someone who knows the vineyard by first name, and the meals feel stitched to their landscapes: surf-salted, orchard-sweet, woodsmoke-warm.
The best restaurants in regional Victoria make the drive part of the appetite. Tiny chef-led dining rooms, destination degustations, farm-garden tables and brilliant wine bars are turning towns from Birregurra to Beechworth into places worth staying the night for. This edit zeroes in on what feels most exciting right now: restaurants with a clear point of view, serious drinks programs and menus built around what’s thriving nearby.
Mount William Station
A saddle of Gunyah Park lamb says plenty about the ambition at Mount William Station: butchered on site, aged in beeswax from the property’s own hives, then plated with caramelised swede, Dutch Cream potato purée, burnt-thyme acid butter and Grampians Shiraz vinegar gel. Luke Wakefield’s nightly three-course menu follows that same thread, drawing on the kitchen garden, olive grove and nearby producers. Dessert can be just as elaborate, with warm chocolate mousse, crystallised rose petals and lillypillies filled with Nebbiolo ice wine, finished with wattleseed and star-anise sugar.
Sitchu Tip: You can book a table without staying over; checking in simply means there’s nowhere else you need to be afterwards.
118 Mount William Estate Road, Willaura
Gornelly’s
Gornelly’s has nailed the kind of all-day place every country town deserves. Astrid Connelly and David Gorniak’s checkerboard-floored Castlemaine cafe-bar starts with espresso, filled focaccia and house-made cake, before wine gets opened and the menu shifts towards terrine, fluffy focaccia, seasonal vegetables and whatever looks good from the tiny kitchen. There’s affogato with house-made ice cream for the finish, a sharp little wine list and plenty of reason to come back after dark.
196 Barker Street, Castlemaine
Chauncy
A little French country life has taken root in Heathcote, and Chauncy may have perfected it. Chef Louis Naepels and sommelier Tess Murray now host just one six-course table d’hôte lunch, built around vegetables and herbs from their garden, beautiful Victorian produce and wines chosen with equal care.
The menu changes with the season, but recent plates have wandered from Australian bay lobster tortellini with bisque and tarragon to Great Ocean duck with satsuma plum, before cheese and a cloud-soft île flottante. Set inside an 1854 sandstone beauty, this is lunch as an afternoon affair: arrive at 12:30pm, surrender to the French of it all and let Louis and Tess take it from there. Chauncy remains one of Australia’s standout destination restaurants and appears in Gourmet Traveller’s 2026 list of the country’s best.
178 High Street, Heathcote
Greasy Zoe’s
Eight seats, 32 diners a week and not a written menu in sight. Greasy Zöes is Zoe Birch’s tiny Hurstbridge dining room, shaped day by day by what nearby growers have ready and what can be used completely. Birch has turned kangaroo grass and speargrass from Bruce Pascoe’s farm into a pastry bed for wood-fire barbecued Warrigal greens, laid over Warrigal green pesto and macadamia cream — and it’s a dish that explains her cooking better than any sustainability manifesto could. Ingredients are fermented, preserved, dehydrated and coaxed into unexpected places before she is finished with them. The scale is microscopic, the thinking anything but.
Shop 3/850 Heidelberg – Kinglake Road, Hurstbridge
Wickens at Royal Mail Hotel
The kitchen garden is 1.2 hectares. The cellar runs to some 30,000 bottles. And somehow neither feels like the headline once dinner begins. Wickens at Royal Mail Hotel lets Dunkeld dictate the menu, with Robin Wickens building each degustation around that morning’s harvest — winter brassicas, Jerusalem artichoke, quince and even acorn alongside beef and lamb raised in neighbouring paddocks. Floor-to-ceiling windows keep southern Gariwerd in view as the light changes outside, while one of Australia’s great wine cellars takes care of the glass. Book with daylight left; watching the mountains darken between courses is half the magic.
98 Parker Street, Dunkeld
LOTTE
Lotte has become one of Hepburn Springs’ best little double acts. By day, it’s coffee, truffled omelettes, grilled sardines and a beautifully stacked Lotte plate of cheese, charcuterie and pickles; by Friday and Saturday night, Bistro Lotte takes over. Pancho alumni Ben and Jess Allen run the kitchen with Wes and Madeleine Hendricks, keeping Victorian produce and local wine close to the centre of things. Come for breakfast, drift back for a glass, then stay for schnitzel with tarragon mayo. Very easy to love, and even easier to revisit again.
Thursday to Monday, 8am to 3pm, with Saturday nights extending into evening service
97 Main Road, Hepburn Springs
Ava Dining
Ava Dining is Milawa’s after-dark mood: casual fine dining with a clever drinks program and a menu that riffs on the North East larder with fresh, modern confidence. Start with oysters laced in smoked olive oil and champagne mignonette, then lean into the kitchen’s brighter signatures: kingfish with jalapeño, coconut and kaffir, or prawn tortellini in laksa. Finish sweet with vanilla panna cotta dusted in bee pollen.
1594 Snow Road, Milawa
Barragunda Dining
Barragunda Dining is a new farm-and-garden dining room on the edge of Cape Schanck: a glass pavilion reached via a 1.5km walk through coastal scrub, set beside the market garden that supplies the kitchen. Chef-farmer Simone Watts builds a tightly seasonal set menu around vegetables pulled from the soil nearby, joined by estate-reared meat, local seafood, ferments and bright, clean flavours. It is destination dining in the truest sense — and bookings disappear quickly.
113 Cape Schanck Road, Cape Schanck
Koji Bird Restaurant
Koji Bird gives Bright a very good reason to stay out after dark, turning Reed & Co’s distillery into an izakaya-style dining room centred on a custom wood-fired grill. What began as a koji experiment now drives the menu, from its cult Koji chicken to venison tataki, prawn toast and steak kissed by the fire. House spirits naturally take care of the cocktails. This is mountain-town dining with a smoky, deeply savoury streak.
15 Wills Street, Bright
TARRA
Set aside the afternoon; TARRA is Bellarine long-lunch territory, right on the water in Queenscliff with Port Phillip Bay beyond the glass and the ferry slipping in and out nearby. The menu makes excellent use of its coastal postcode: bluefin tuna tartlets with wattle seed, baked scallops finished with finger lime and Southern Rock Lobster with saltbush butter sit alongside house-cured charcuterie and a drinks list heavy on local Victorian producers.
1 Wharf Street East, Queenscliff
Noble Rot
Noble Rot is Point Lonsdale’s answer to the dangerous “just one glass” afternoon. The seaside wine bar and bottle shop has a cellar worth getting lost in, spanning serious Burgundy and Barolo to excellent Australian producers, while the kitchen is in equally fine form. Anchovy toast comes loaded with stracciatella and salsa verde, Spencer Gulf kingfish gets blood orange and trout roe, and spaghetti arrives tangled with Shark Bay spanner crab.
51 Point Lonsdale Road, Point Lonsdale
Lost Cat
It began with a missing cat named Larry and ended with Warrnambool getting one of its sharpest dining rooms. Lost Cat Dining is family-run, low-lit and very good at the details: snapper crudo glossed with white soy, charred cabbage with cashew cream, rosemary focaccia blistered from the oven and scotch fillet cooked blushing pink. Dessert might mean banoffee pie one week, dense chocolate torte the next. There is precision here, but no stiffness — just excellent cooking, warm service and plenty of reason to stay for another glass.
69 Liebig Street, Warrnambool
Babae
Babae is Ballarat dining at its most beautiful. Inside Hotel Vera, just 26 seats face a kitchen working with near-balletic calm as chef Tim Foster sends out a degustation shaped by the region around it. Salt-baked kohlrabi arrives with astonishing delicacy; lemon-cured kingfish meets pickled quince and ajo blanco; sourdough made with locally milled flour comes with whipped Inglenook butter and dehydrated Vegemite — salty, savoury, brilliant.
Then dessert: steamed pudding with saffron-poached pear, pistachio, meringue and crème anglaise, soft enough to stop conversation for a moment. Babae has that rare ability to make dinner feel suspended from the rest of the day.
710 Sturt Street, Ballarat Central
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The Coast Restaurant
The Coast Restaurant is an Anglesea dining room worth pulling over for. The menu stays close to the Great Ocean Road, with Zeally Bay sourdough, Bells Beach lamb and Otway produce appearing across a modern Australian line-up that changes with the seasons. Sardines arrive with pepperberry chimichurri, oxtail becomes croquettes, and slow-braised beef cheek brings the kind of depth you want after a day on the coast. Finish with whiskey and marmalade bread-and-butter pudding and call it a very good detour.
105 Great Ocean Road, Anglesea
Emerald City
Behind a velvet curtain in Healesville, Emerald City seats just four people at a time. Chef Joel Alderdice, formerly of Bar Liberty and TarraWarra Estate, runs the tiny dining room through 13 to 15 courses that move between intricate snacks, hibachi-grilled meats and flashes of pure imagination. His “rainbow trout” is almost too beautiful to disturb; dessert tends to send things somewhere stranger still. With the kitchen unfolding just metres away, dinner here has the intimacy of being let in on a very elaborate secret.
207 Maroondah Highway, Healesville
Many Little Bar & Dining
Many Little Bar & Dining brings the flavours of chef Gayan Pieris’ Sri Lankan childhood to the middle of Red Hill, with Mornington Peninsula produce keeping things close to home. Many ingredients travel barely a kilometre from sister property Polperro Farm before meeting specific-origin spices, sambols and curries in the kitchen. The full chef’s menu builds towards a gloriously abundant hopper thali, while the bar and courtyard offer a looser route through short eats, cocktails and glasses of Polperro and Even Keel wine. One of the Peninsula’s most singular tables.
2-5/159 Shoreham Road, Red Hill South
Samesyn
At Samesyn, waste tends to reappear somewhere far more delicious. Graham Jefferies’ Torquay dining room turns overlooked ingredients into some wonderfully clever things: grilled octopus with spent-citrus kosho, broccoli with egg-white garum, retired dairy cow slicked with garum butter and dark chocolate with sourdough ice cream and whey caramel. Even passionfruit skins and spent coffee make it to dessert. The $99 tasting menu is the best way through it — inventive, occasionally surprising and proof that low-waste cooking needn’t taste remotely virtuous.
3/24 Bell Street, Torquay
No.7 Healesville
At No.7 Healesville, even the wine by the glass refuses to sit still. Bottles rotate throughout service and everything is open to taste, while an amaro trolley makes a very welcome appearance tableside later on. Chef Joel Bowers changes his shared menu weekly according to what arrives from producers: winter might bring mushroom vol-au-vent, pici tangled with egg yolk and truffle butter, stuffed squid with puttanesca rice and boeuf bourguignon. Barrels, chandeliers and seriously good drinking complete the picture.
7 Lilydale Road, Healesville
Kadota
Kadota is what happens when Daylesford meets Japan at the dinner table. Chef Aaron Schembri and front-of-house director Risa Kadota shape seven- and ten-course menus around a reconsidered take on kaiseki, threading Japanese technique through ingredients from the region around them. One course might arrive as pristine sashimi, another as Wagyu with a sake pairing; even the final tea course is treated with ceremony. The whole evening is measured, intimate and exacting, with every plate given its own little moment.
1 Camp Street, Daylesford
KIN
KIN is a destination worth the drive, set inside All Saints Estate’s heritage-listed castle in Wahgunyah. Floor-to-ceiling windows look out over vines and the lake, setting a quietly grand scene for modern Australian dining grounded in family recipes and estate produce. Order the striploin with bone marrow or Murray cod, then let the cellar do what it does best: rare back vintages, award-winning table wines and those legendary fortifieds.
205 All Saints Road, Wahgunyah
O.MY Restaurant
At O.MY, tomorrow’s menu is still growing. Brothers Blayne and Chayse Bertoncello run the Beaconsfield restaurant in tandem with their farm ten minutes away, home to hundreds of garden beds, an orchard, beehive and chickens. What is ready to pick dictates the daily-changing four- and seven-course menus, with Blayne’s cooking stretching every harvest well beyond the obvious. Chayse handles the wine with equal intent, drawing on Victorian bottles alongside clever international finds. Few restaurants collapse the distance between garden and dinner quite so completely.
70 Princes Highway, Beaconsfield
Messmates
A six-metre terrazzo bar runs through the middle of this former Warragul church, which is a rather excellent place to begin. Messmates is the family project of siblings Chris and Jodie Odrowaz and their partners Jess and Michael, bringing serious kitchen pedigree to a dining room that keeps things loose and generous. European ideas meet Gippsland produce across a share-style menu, while local bottles, smart imports, seasonal cocktails and digestifs make staying for another round dangerously easy. Even The Age Good Food Guide named it 2025 Regional Restaurant of the Year.
15 Palmerston Street, Warragul
Doot Doot Doot
Ten thousand golden globes ripple across the ceiling at Doot Doot Doot, mimicking wine caught mid-ferment above the tables. Beneath them, Michael Wickham’s tasting menu gets wonderfully curious: chestnut agnolotti with duck broth and Flinders truffle, koji-cured hapuka with wakame butter, or lamb paired with smoked eggplant miso, Xinjiang-spiced rib and XO jus. Even Pinot Noir becomes dessert, reworked with cultured-cream parfait, burnt-grape caramel and wine-preserved blackberries. Jackalope may be famous for its looks; dinner deserves equal attention.
166 Balnarring Road, Merricks North
Chae
Six people at a time get to eat inside chef Jung Eun Chae’s home in the hills of Cockatoo. Chae began in a tiny Brunswick apartment and has since moved deeper into the Dandenongs, but the scale remains wonderfully personal. Traditional Korean jangs ferment in clay onggi around the property, some requiring years of patience before Chae folds them into a menu shaped by preservation, season and her own garden. Expect handmade kimchi, deeply flavoured broths, pristine seafood and house-brewed makgeolli rather than Korean dining’s greatest hits.
Seats are released by lottery. Winning one is worth getting excited about.
33 Mountain Road, Cockatoo
Sault
Lavender is not merely part of the view at Sault. It turns up on the plate too, glazing duck breast with honey before mountain pepper jus, chinotto and caramelised swede join the party. Beyond the windows, 50 kitchen-garden beds, a lake and flower fields spread across the Sailors Falls estate; inside, the menu runs from Fremantle octopus with nduja XO and finger lime to 72-hour fermented sourdough and strawberry Bombe Alaska sharpened with pink peppercorn. It is one of Daylesford’s prettiest dining rooms, but the food has plenty to say for itself.
2349 Ballan-Daylesford Road, Sailors Falls
Bar Midland
Nothing on the table at Bar Midland crosses a state border. Loudon Cooper and Alexander Marano source every ingredient, bottle and spirit from Victoria, with monthly menus making room for Indigenous foods, edible weeds and introduced wild game alongside produce from regenerative and biodynamic growers. The same rule applies in The Radio Room, its adjoining bar-meets-lounge, yet the drinks list was still named The Age Good Food Guide’s 2026 Drinks List of the Year. Restriction, here, breeds very good ideas.
Shop 1/2 Templeton Street, Castlemaine
Underbar
Friday and Saturday are the only nights Underbar opens its doors, and Ballarat diners know to book accordingly. Chef Derek Boath brings time at New York’s three-Michelin-starred Per Se to a 20-seat room on Doveton Street North, but the current format is refreshingly concise: three seasonal courses shaped by what local farmers, growers and makers have at their best that week. Optional extras and wine pairings leave room to stretch dinner out. Serious pedigree, zero need for ceremony.
3 Doveton Street North, Ballarat Central
Lake House
Daylesford’s two-hatted Lake House is the grand dame of best restaurants in regional Victoria. There are few better ways to spend an afternoon than eating their truly seasonal fare while basking in the soft sunlight that enters the restaurant’s tall windows. The team produce almost everything onsite, from growing vegetables and baking bread to even curing their own charcuterie. Enjoy magnificent views of treetops and lake shores as you dine on dishes such as butter poached pheasant with chestnuts or spring lamb with asparagus and morels.
Sitchu Tip: After dessert, move onto the outdoor deck for a relaxing aperitif.
4 King Street, Daylesford
The Boathouse Restaurant
The room lets Lake Daylesford do the scenic heavy lifting at The Boathouse Restaurant, while chef-owner Nixson gets on with dinner. Trained in Rotterdam before cooking across Europe, he channels that background into dishes such as Shark Bay scallop with cauliflower mousseline and rock lobster, or forest mushroom risotto fragrant with Spargo Creek black truffle. Saturday night stretches to a seven-course experience; dessert might finish with crème brûlée and a chocolate ganache cigar. Nab a table by the water.
2 Leggatt Street, Daylesford
Provenance
The old bank vault holds wine now. Upstairs, beneath six-metre ceilings in an 1856 gold-rush building, Provenance sends out 18 small dishes across four courses, shaped by chef Michael Ryan’s long-running fascination with Japan. Wild venison tataki meets pickled rhubarb; kangaroo gets the yakiniku treatment with miso and chilli; dessert might arrive as a miso, honey and kinako ice-cream sandwich. Fourteen consecutive years with two Good Food Guide hats suggest Beechworth knows exactly how lucky it is.
86 Ford Street, Beechworth
Brae
The bread begins as grain in the field; the olive oil with trees outside. At Brae, Dan Hunter’s Birregurra farm supplies up to 90 per cent of the fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts, honey and edible plants that shape his tasting menu. Winter might bring a potato gem with lovage, black truffle and aged mountain tomme, wild-shot fallow deer glazed with oloroso, then the parsnip-and-apple dessert that has survived since opening day. Wander the farm afterwards and suddenly dinner starts making sense from the ground up.
4285 Cape Otway Road, Birregurra
Tedesca Osteria
Lunch at Tedesca Osteria runs to a glorious three-and-a-half or four hours, with just 30 seats and one sitting around Brigitte Hafner’s open kitchen in Red Hill. From a blackened timber bench beside the great brick hearth, Hafner rolls pasta, works the wood-fired oven and open grill, and builds a five-course menu around whatever is thriving on Tedesca’s biodynamic farm. Antipasto gives way to handmade pasta, seafood, meat and dessert; between courses, there may be time for a wander through the garden or a fossick through the cellar. The menu changes with the harvest, the fire does much of the talking and lunch is allowed to take exactly as long as it needs.
1175 Mornington Flinders Road, Red Hill
Thousand Pound Wine Bar & Store
A scoop of pandan ice cream drowned in Rutherglen Muscat tells you pretty quickly that this is no ordinary wine-country dinner. Thousand Pound has entered a delicious new era under executive chef Jack Cassidy, pairing north-east Victorian produce with flavours drawn from China, Thailand, Vietnam and Nepal. Pork belly ssam, mushroom XO spring onion pancakes and venison pho with bone marrow might land before that Muscat affogato, while Rutherglen bottles naturally keep pace. Thursday to Saturday nights suddenly look rather well occupied, don’t you think?
82 Main Street, Rutherglen
FAQs
Some of the best restaurants in regional Victoria include Brae in Birregurra, Tedesca Osteria in Red Hill, Chauncy in Heathcote, Wickens at Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld, Lake House in Daylesford and Provenance in Beechworth. Across the state, the standouts range from farm-led degustations and intimate chef-run dining rooms to brilliant wine bars and long lunches built around local produce.
Planning a regional holiday after reading through our guide to the best restaurants regional Victoria is so good at crafting? Before you book anything, make sure to consult our guides to the best tiny cabins, luxury accommodation, and romantic getaways in Victoria. Happy travels!
