The Best Restaurants in Regional Victoria Worth the Drive

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.

New & Noteworthy

Rühe

Kyneton has a new reason to make Piper Street the whole point of the drive. At Rühe, former Quay 2IC and Merricote chef Rob Kabboord is cooking a compact neo-bistro menu with Daniel Saligari running the room and cellar, inside a tiny burgundy-and-walnut dining room that seats barely more than a good dinner party. Carrot comes with feta, ice plant and smoked almonds; local pork is braised in Boatrocker stout; Rankin cod lands with pearl barley, pickled celery and Portarlington mussels. There are around 80 wines, serious beer pairings, handmade ceramics and whispers of a returning cheese trolley. Book now, before Kyneton has to start sharing.

58 Piper Street, Kyneton

Table Records

Some restaurants have a wine list; Table Records has a record collection, DJs, very cold martinis and Ali Currey-Voumard cooking dinner out back. The former Agrarian Kitchen head chef and Public Wine Shop alum has turned a Castlemaine record store into a three-night-a-week European-leaning bistro, working Central Victorian produce into whatever makes sense that week. Thursdays are especially good: a $60 shared menu that changes constantly, followed, ideally, by another drink and absolutely no rush to leave. Pork terrine and gildas have appeared before; vinyl is rather more permanent.

16 Hargraves Street, Castlemaine

Josephine’s

Goat’s-curd agnolotti with flame-cap mushrooms is a rather good way for a new Woodend wine bar to introduce itself. Josephine’s followed it with crudités and warm bagna cauda, then roast beef under potato-skin miso hollandaise, setting expectations considerably higher than cheese-and-charcuterie territory. The menu moves seasonally through small organic growers and artisan producers, while the cellar looks close to home for Macedon Ranges and regional Victorian bottles, particularly natural and minimal-intervention wines. Woodend has a very good new reason to miss the train home.

Shop 4, 80 High Street, Woodend

House of Mi-Rin

Lunch at House of Mi-Rin begins long before anyone sits down. It starts in the garden, in the onggi, in milk from resident dairy cow Iza churned into butter, fruit slowly becoming cheong, vegetables disappearing into kimchi. Sherin Wong’s 16-seat dining room sits on the 51-acre Yea property she and Ming-Ne Tan spent eight years bringing to life, with Korean food culture shaping a meal that feels deeply tied to the land around it. Public lunch happens just one Saturday each month and ends with a walk through the farm. By then, the place has already told you most of its story.

5393 Goulburn Valley Highway, Yea

Best Restaurants in the Grampians & Western Victoria

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

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

Best Restaurants in Ballarat & the Goldfields

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

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

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

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 

Best Restaurants in Daylesford, Macedon Ranges & Central Victoria

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

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

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

Lake House

Lake House has spent decades making Daylesford lunch feel like its own category of time. Much of what lands on the plate begins on the property, from vegetables and bread to house-cured charcuterie, before heading into a kitchen still very much interested in the season rather than nostalgia. Butter-poached pheasant might arrive with chestnuts; spring lamb with asparagus and morels. Tall windows frame the lake and treetops, but the room has enough confidence now not to rely on the view. Two hats later, the old magic is still there.

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

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

Best Restaurants in the Yarra Valley and Dandenong Ranges

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 

TarraWarra Estate

The museum next door could easily steal lunch’s thunder; at TarraWarra Estate, Daniel Snooks makes sure it doesn’t. The former Rockpool, Cumulus Inc and Centonove chef cooks from a quarter-acre kitchen garden and whatever can be sourced nearby, recently sending out duck-liver parfait on brown-butter cake, raviolo submerged in potato foam and chicken jus, then a rubble of rhubarb, pear, granola and sabayon for dessert. One Good Food Guide hat later, there is now a very good reason to arrive hungry before looking at the art.

311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Yarra Glen

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

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

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 

Best Restaurants on the Mornington Peninsula

The Dining Room at Lancemore Lindenderry

There is something deliciously old-fashioned about disappearing into 34 acres of Red Hill gardens for lunch and resurfacing several hours later. At The Dining Room at Lancemore Lindenderry, Michelin-trained executive chef Nick McGonigal has sharpened the hotel restaurant into a serious proposition of its own. Abrolhos scallop is torched and hit with XO; roast quail arrives under a rosemary-scented cloud of smoke; Sher Wagyu rostbiff meets black garlic and beetroot. Beyond the glass are vines, old trees and the excellent possibility of surrendering your car keys and staying the night.

142 Arthurs Seat Road, Red Hill

Ten Minutes by Tractor

The name began with three vineyards sitting ten minutes by tractor apart; decades later, Ten Minutes by Tractor has become one of the Peninsula meals people genuinely arrange entire weekends around. Craig Lunn draws on Michelin-starred kitchens in Britain and Europe for three increasingly elaborate menus, fed partly by the regenerative 10X Farm next door. Garden courgette might meet scallop, buttermilk and jalapeño; O’Connor beef gets fermented lettuce, date and ssamjang. Then there is the wine list: more than 1,500 bottles and over 100 wines poured by the glass. Choosing the Signature menu means giving them three or so hours. Give them the three hours.

1333 Mornington-Flinders Road, Main Ridge

Laura

At Laura, Josep Espuga has 40 seats, two hats and very little interest in playing small. Recent menus have sent out sand crab with Peninsula kelp and Oscietra caviar, flambéed Southern Rock lobster, Blackmore Wagyu with tendon dashi and a Main Ridge Dairy goat cheesecake slicked with burnt honey. The wine cellar runs 750 bottles deep, nearly 40 by the glass. Outside, 70-odd sculptures sprawl across 16.5 acres; inside, lunch is doing enough sculpting of its own.

3649 Frankston-Flinders Road, Merricks

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 

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

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

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

Best Restaurants on the Bellarine and Great Ocean Road

Surf Hotel

Torquay’s old Surf City Motel has come back with better manners, excellent lighting and Jo Barrett in the kitchen. Surf Hotel faces the front beach beneath a racing-red awning, with an American-walnut bar, strange amber latex pendants and old-school Mambo artwork threaded with surfboard fins. Barrett and head chef Aaron Brodie cook according to whatever arrives on the farm list: house mortadella, focaccia with Southern Seagreens wakame butter, crisp king oyster mushrooms with fenugreek-spiked cashew cream and wild venison schnitzel swimming in parsley cream. The fish-finger sandwich is already bordering on folklore; her Wildpie boar dim sim comes slicked with chilli oil. Come sandy-footed for one, accidentally order six things, then watch the light go down over the water from the deck. Torquay has its grown-up local.

35 The Esplanade, Torquay

Miettas & The Conservatory

Two restaurants now live inside the restored Queenscliff Hotel, and choosing between them is half the fun. Miettas is the dressier move, reviving one of Australian hospitality’s great names with a seasonal degustation, crisp service and a room built for a proper night out. The Conservatory is looser and, arguably, the more seductive proposition right now: glass roof overhead, sea air nearby, wood-fired prawns with hummus and tarragon, Jerusalem artichoke with grapefruit and freekeh, local fish lifted with lemon myrtle.

One for the reservation you plan around, one for lunch that accidentally eats the afternoon. Queenscliff suddenly has range.

16 Gellibrand Street, Queenscliff

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

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

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

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

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

Best Restaurants in North East Victoria

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

Koji Bird Restaurant 

Koji Bird Restaurant has one ace up its sleeve: the shochu in your highball was distilled metres from the table. Reed & Co’s Bright distillery opens into an izakaya-inspired dining room, with local produce over the wood fire, venison tataki and the cult Koji chicken worth planning dinner around. Cocktails stay close to home too, built on Australian shochu and house spirits. Smoky, spirited and made for passing plates, this is how Bright should feel after a day on the trails.

15 Wills Street, Bright 

Brown Brothers Restaurant

The kitchen garden behind Brown Brothers Restaurant now matters almost as much as the cellar. Head chef Bodee Price and his team tend it themselves, picking what is ready each day and working it through nine savoury share plates with a sharp eye on waste. The longer play is the three-hour, five-course Slow Lunch, matched to premium Brown Brothers wines. Even casual grazing gets strange in the right places: Wagyu bresaola, fried barramundi wing and focaccia slicked with garden ‘waste’ oil. Its return to the Good Food Guide award list for 2026 confirms this is far beyond cellar-door lunch.

244 Milawa-Bobinawarrah Road, Milawa

GRACE. bar + eatery

GRACE. is only 7.2 metres wide, which makes the amount happening inside it rather satisfying. Matthieu and Erica Miller opened the Rutherglen restaurant in 2021 and named it after Matthieu’s strong-willed grandmother; five years later, there’s a Good Food Guide hat above the door. The menu changes constantly, currently running through duck croquettes with quince aioli, chicken agnolotti with Fighting Gully Road truffle and maitake, hanger steak and ricotta pannacotta. Victorian small-producer wines handle the rest.

84 Main Street, Rutherglen

Ava Dining

Ava Dining makes Milawa after dark feel much more interesting. The menu skips neatly between Europe and South-East Asia without losing sight of the North East, moving from oysters with smoked olive oil and champagne mignonette to kingfish with jalapeño, coconut and kaffir, then prawn tortellini in laksa. Dessert keeps things simple with vanilla panna cotta and bee pollen. The room is polished but not precious, the drinks list is smart, and dinner has enough spark to make the cellar-door day feel like merely the opening act.

1594 Snow Road, Milawa

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

KIN

The castle gets the photographs; KIN gets on with lunch. Inside All Saints Estate’s heritage-listed Wahgunyah landmark, the menu works through estate produce and family threads with a more contemporary hand, from Murray cod to striploin with bone marrow. Then the cellar starts showing off: rare back vintages, serious table wines and the fortifieds that made Rutherglen famous in the first place. Floor-to-ceiling windows keep the vines and lake close, but this is one of those lunches that increasingly asks you to look back at the table.

205 All Saints Road, Wahgunyah

Best Restaurants in Gippsland

TUCKA @ Maffco

There’s a hidden door at the back of a century-old Maffra milk factory, and behind it dinner begins several kilometres away on the owners’ cattle farm. TUCKA @ Maffco works almost absurdly close to home: Speckle Park beef from Benbullen Farms is butchered on site, vegetables come from the garden, honey from the hives out back and seafood from Lakes Entrance. Saltbush damper arrives with Maffco honey butter, house-cured bresaola with blue cheese and roasted grapes, and the wood fire takes care of the serious cuts. Thirty-five seats, Friday and Saturday only, one Chef Hat and not a wasted kilometre in sight.

Maffco Lane, Maffra

Messmates 

A six-metre terrazzo bar cuts through the middle of a former Warragul church, which tells you fairly quickly that Messmates is not interested in behaving like a typical country dining room. Siblings Chris and Jodie Odrowaz and their partners Jess and Michael run the place with serious kitchen experience but none of the stiffness, folding European ideas through Gippsland produce across a generous share menu. Local bottles sit beside clever imports, cocktails change with the seasons and digestifs tend to prolong the evening. The Age Good Food Guide naming it 2025 Regional Restaurant of the Year suddenly feels very unsurprising.

15 Palmerston Street, Warragul

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

SARDINE dining

The 45-minute drive to Paynesville earns its keep at SARDINE dining, Mark Briggs’ one-hat dining room overlooking Raymond Island. The menu moves with the catch and the season, currently running from rock oysters and dry-aged bonito to blue swimmer crab casareccia, sardine fillets with smoked garlic aioli and local greens slicked with yuzu butter. Stay for dessert, then wander next door to SARDINE Cantina for another glass. East Gippsland does destination dining very well.

69 Esplanade, Paynesville

Hogget Kitchen

At Hogget Kitchen, Trevor Perkins waits for Gippsland to arrive before he decides what dinner will be. Fish comes up from Corner Inlet, trout from Noojee, truffles from the Baw Baw slopes, meat from nearby farms, then everything is butchered, cured, smoked, pickled and stretched into a menu that might run from rabbit liver parfait and venison croquettes to rock flathead with roe mayonnaise or pork rump glossed with beetroot jus. The dining room looks across vines and olive groves to the Strzelecki Ranges. Four or six courses later, the whole region feels startlingly close.

6 Farrington Close, Warragul

Neeri Nuff Wine Bar & Kitchen

Neerim South has roughly the population of a decent Melbourne apartment block, yet somehow one of Gippsland’s most interesting wine lists is sitting on its main street. Neeri Nuff Wine Bar & Kitchen keeps just 30 seats and more than 120 Australian bottles, with William Downie, Narkoojee and other Gippsland names close at hand. Connor Turnbull’s menu follows suit: house sourdough with Gippsland Jersey cultured butter and Shiraz salt, Jindi Pig pork shoulder tucked into brioche, Noojee trout through silky leek tagliatelle, Maffra cheese to finish. Hatted, intimate and far more ambitious than “wine bar” lets on, this is the sort of regional restaurant you plan the drive around.

115 Main Neerim Road, Neerim South 

FAQs

Planning a few days around the reservation? Continue with Sitchu’s guides to Victoria’s best tiny cabins, beautiful regional accommodation and romantic getaways.