Sliced tomatoes of different colors and sizes had been piled up on the bread, one falling on top of the other like drunk friends. Combined, their flavor was sour and syrupy. They had tremendous density at the end of summer. Powerful garnishes intensified each bite: dark anchovy fillets, tarragon leaves, and flecks of pickled fried shallots.
And the soft, green puree that oozes out from under the tomatoes? It looked like the familiar flesh of the Hass avocado extracted from its wrinkled purplish-black skin and mashed into butter. It took a second for my jet-lagged palate to register the brine. Green olive tapenade.
The tomato toast at Florian.
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
I should have known, straight from Melbourne airport, that Besha Rodell, chief restaurant critic for the city's daily newspaper, Age, and one of my closest friends for 20 years, wouldn't feed me the cliché of avocado toast as my first experience in Australia. I would soon understand that, like the city where I live, Melbourne's culinary framework cannot be easily pigeonholed. It is much more of a mosaic than a monolith.
Florian, where we were eating, is located at the bottom of a two-storey Victorian-era building in Rathdowne Village, a historic section of the city's inner Carlton North suburb. Its lived-in rooms conveyed a modern style that echoed what I had heard about Melbourne's famous café culture. But the market-focused menu, which includes pies packed with roasted plum and lime pearls, eluded simple definitions. My guide for the next two weeks understood well the nuanced first impression all this would make.
Use these handy dining guides for all your summer trips, near and far.
Besha had last been LA Weekly's restaurant critic, from 2012 to 2017, before returning to her hometown of Melbourne. He initially left Australia for the United States with his family when he was 14 years old. Since she came back, we had been talking about me going to see her for almost a decade.
I finally showed up in Australia's southernmost mainland city in March 2025, scheduled partly to check out the festivities around the annual Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and largely to consume as much of the city as I could with the great gastronomic soulmate of my life.
The crowd on the sidewalk at the Florian restaurant located in the inner suburb of Carlton North in Melbourne.
(Bill Addison)
Traveling anywhere for the first time is a reconciliation between your excited imagination, perhaps exhaustively fueled by research, and the reality that awaits you. Even on the drive between the airport pickup lane and Florian, I realized that I had never been anywhere that I had so intensely previewed through someone else's experience.
I had imagined Besha walking the tall, crowded aisles of Queen Victoria Market as a child, eating a mustard-slathered sausage while her stepfather waited for his flat white. Many times, I had repeated to myself the most prophetic fragments of Melbourne's history in relation to food culture. In the 1830s, the British colonized this area where the mouth of the Yarra River widens into what would be called Port Phillip Bay. Less than 20 years later, a Victorian-era gold rush accelerated the city's growth and population. The influx of wealth fostered an early taste for champagne. By contrast, generations of pubs have catered for a wide swath of society, so many Melburnians enjoy eating out at affordable prices as a matter of course. He had often spoken of sincere hospitality in Melbourne, a career for people of warm character who experience work as a vocation and not as a menial job that bothers them.
Bratwurst from Queen Victoria Market.
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Besha also knew the premise that would eventually land me on a Qantas flight: like Los Angeles, the greatness of Melbourne's modern dining moment derives from the immigrant communities that have taken root in the city since its founding. Between the two cities, the similarities and differences in the origins of those communities make Melbourne's culinary fabric innately familiar to Angelenos and also something entirely different to experience.
We plunged into a crazy two-week whirlwind of eating and drinking, starting with the basics.
My first dinner in Melbourne: Flower Drum, the 50-year-old Cantonese fine dining institution. The room is swathed in its mid-century glamour, right down to the red carpet and luxuriously spaced tables that keep the room quiet and conversations private. The Peking duck, which arrived already wrapped in translucent wrappers with meticulous sheets of crispy skin and hoisin-flecked meat, was delicious, but it was the seafood that hooked me. He had never eaten pearl meat, the delicacy grown in Western Australia and made from the pearl oyster's adductor muscle that adheres to its iridescent shell. Its qualities encompassed the flavor bridge between scallop and lobster. The waiters suggested mud crab, a variety known for its firmer, more flavorful sweetness that could stand up to the richness of the Macau-style coconut curry sauce in which it was baked.
At the Cantonese institution Flower Drum, a portion of pearl meat, a delicacy grown in Western Australia and made from the adductor muscle of the pearl oyster that adheres to its iridescent shell. Its flavor unites scallop and lobster.
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
The next day, between several stops, I held a piece of whimsical pizza in my hands. We had grabbed a sidewalk table at the University Café on Lygon Street, one of the first epicenters of Italian-owned businesses when a wave of immigrants arrived after World War II with their penchant for strong coffee and, as technology has a way of shaping societies, recent advances in commercial espresso machines.
Ham, olives, mushrooms and artichokes traditionally top a capricciosa, which supposedly originated in Rome in the 1950s as a “clean out the fridge” pie. In the era of the Neapolitan cult, some Melburnians disdain its existence because of the cheap ingredients that defined early Australian versions. Besha is evangelical about the local value of capricious, especially when it consists of fresh mushrooms and good smoked ham, as it was here.
A routine for our days took shape. Besha, who had introduced me to my first macchiato 15 years ago but didn't have the taste for ultra-expressive drinks that I'd cultivated since moving to Los Angeles, left me to my morning coffee walks. We would meet for lunch, maybe stop by a second location, take a few hours to ourselves, regroup for a cocktail or glass of wine at a bar, and then have dinner. Then sometimes head to another restaurant or end up at another bar.
At Serai, a flagship Filipino restaurant hidden down a street in the central business district, we ate kangaroo meat prepared as a variation on kiliwan, seared and bathed in vinegar and citrus. Its flavor reminded me of the lean, slightly spicy venison that my uncle hunted in my childhood.
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times) The birregurra martini at Brae Restaurant; the whimsical pizza in Ciudad Universitaria; and Moroccan gnocchi at Malin in Melbourne. (Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
Navi, a tasting menu restaurant where the cost is a relatively reasonable $135 per person (the exchange rate in Australia is still quite favorable to the US dollar), pepper dishes with indigenous ingredients: tomatoes with raisins, macadamias, citrus-flavored green ants and cilantro. Big Esso, a celebrated First Nations restaurant, had closed the week I arrived; This was my closest experience to indigenous cuisine.
Martinis would transition to earthy and spicy pasta meals. A Lebanese breakfast led to a lunch of beautifully lumpy crab meat with fried potato cakes at the Builders Arms Hotel, one of the poshest pubs, and to a dinner of cerebral French cuisine at an underrated restaurant called Malin. I had my first encounter with the gorgeously blended flavors of Mauritian food at a place called Manzé, which, with the delicacy of the rotis and the fragrance of mustard seeds and pumpkin-infused curry leaves, I wish I could transport to Southern California.
We embarked on adventures at a meditative Korean restaurant in a forest town 40 miles east of Melbourne, and down the Mornington Peninsula to a new luminary called Barragunda Dining, located on a working farm where, in concentrated tomatoes, charred yellow peppers, stone fruit and figs, we savored the summer turning into autumn just outside the window.
Just like in Los Angeles, there's no neat way to sum up what to eat in Melbourne. “Diverse” barely covers it. You just give in to curiosity and keep asking, “What else? Who else?”
A variety of Greek dishes at Kafeneion.
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
The biggest surprise I was left with in Melbourne was the excellence and joints of Greek cuisine.
The bursts of noise and oregano at Kafeneion, a restaurant above a wine bar in a building across from the city's Victorian-era Parliament, reminded me of my only trip to Athens a dozen years earlier.
Fascinating liberties were taken at a bar called Tzaki, where crab meat is mixed with moussaka and meals end with a perfectly calibrated feta cheese tart. Then there was Jim's Greek Tavern, a restaurant Besha has been going to most of her life. Customers do not receive a menu at Jim's. It's a conversation about what you want to eat: sauces? Lamb gyro? The coolest Pacific blueeye fish today? —That may be closer to a negotiation.
I met Besha there with her husband, son, mother, three siblings, and their spouses for Sunday lunch. They shouted their practiced requests to the server. The food was a mix of lemon and garlic, but in the roar of the room, my “traveler” mantle disappeared for just a minute. I thought about how the entire family had walked the 15-minute route from Besha's house to the restaurant by memory. I now noticed a relaxation in his figure and a lighter tone in his laughter, and his happiness in taking large mouthfuls of springy saganaki. I saw it Melbourne. I saw house.
Inside Jim's Greek Tavern.
(Bill Addison/Los Angeles Times)
