Wickens at Royal Mail Hotel is a destination restaurant rooted in a place of rare natural drama — the small township of Dunkeld, at the southern foot of the Grampians, where the flat pastoral plains of western Victoria meet the ancient granite faces of Mt Sturgeon and Mt Abrupt. It is the kind of place that asks something of you: a deliberate journey to a landscape that feels genuinely remote and genuinely alive.
O.MY is a restaurant located in the quiet town of Beaconsfield, Victoria, about a 45-minute drive from Melbourne’s CBD. Situated near the farmland of Cardinia, this location is ideal for escaping the hustle and bustle of the city and reconnecting with the essential bond between the land and food. The restaurant is housed in a building that was once Beaconsfield’s post office. Built in 1878, the building boasts a history of nearly 150 years.
Greasy Zoe's is a restaurant at the end of the Hurstbridge line — literally. Set in the centre of Nillumbik Shire, as far as you can get to the edge of Melbourne before entering regional territory, it occupies a former grocery store that has been fitted out, by hand, by the two people who run it. The dining room looks, as more than one writer has noted, like a ski chalet — pitched timber ceiling, brick walls, recycled timber tables. Eight seats. No written menu. A daily-changing 12-course degustation that begins when you arrive and ends when Zoe Birch and Lachlan Gardner wash the last dish.
There are restaurants that source locally, and then there is Brae. The distinction matters. Situated on a 30-acre working farm in Birregurra, in Victoria's Otways hinterland roughly ninety minutes southwest of Melbourne, Brae is not a restaurant that happens to have a garden. It is a farm that happens to contain a restaurant — and that inversion of priorities runs all the way to the plate.
Anyone who reads Japanese manga will understand this feeling. Three basketball buddies who'd been together since elementary school tried to enjoy life together as adults, pooling their strengths. They weren't constantly glued together, and their first jobs after entering society were different. But their promise and desire to work together in the food and beverage world never wavered, and they faithfully carried out their agreement to train overseas at age 27.
The category of street food is always interesting. When served to customers, it is a simple dish with a final touch added, but it is a highly refined food culture that thoroughly adapts to local ingredients and regional lifestyles, and coexists with competition within the same street. No matter where you travel in the world, its charm speaks volumes, but Southeast Asia is a treasure trove of street food, and among them, Thailand's stands out for its quality, diversity, dynamism, and enjoyment.
In the dynamic and fiercely competitive world of Bangkok's fine dining, Chef Chalee Kader stands out as a true visionary, not for inventing a new cuisine but for masterfully elevating a street food staple to the level of Michelin-starred art. At his restaurant Wana Yook, Kader has taken the beloved Thai concept of "khao kaeng"—a simple dish of rice and curry—and transformed it into an elegant and profound culinary journey.
Prin was always in the background of the transformation of Thai food from ethnic cuisine to world cuisine. Sala Rim Naam restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental (then Mandarin) was his first workplace. He learned Thai cuisine in the restaurant that was the face of the hotel, which was also the face of Bangkok to the world.