Hot List Update: Melbourne’s Most Exciting Restaurants Are All Opening Here

The Hot List is the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences, updated weekly. Learn more.

This week’s Hot List activity

• Added: Benchwarmer
• Most trending restaurant: Julie
• Most trending cafe: Dua
• Most trending bar: Slowpoke Lounge & Lookout

Benchwarmer comes off the bench and onto the field

This week, we’re adding Benchwarmer to The Hot List. This beer bar in West Melbourne has been quietly doing its thing since it opened in 2020 – stocking intriguing beers, playing fun tunes and just generally having an immaculate vibe.

The Japanese-style food has always been a surprise highlight of the Benchwarmer experience. Now, under newly recruited executive chef Geoff Marett, it’s stepping out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

Marett spent five years cooking at legendary Hong Kong izakaya Yardbird. His new menu – which includes dishes such as chicken katsu with curry gravy, sourdough crumpets topped with XO lamb, and sake clams with miso butter – is clearly a descendant of the Yardbird lineage.

But it’s also a statement of intent from owner Lachlan Jones. With the new menu and a doubling of the taps at Benchwarmer, he’s ready for the bar to graduate from local darling to cross-city destination.

“Before it really felt like we were downplaying our food,” Jones says. “We’re really excited about being able to promote the quality of what we’re offering with our new menu.”

The North Melbourne restaurant glow-up is here

It’s not just Benchwarmer going from strength to strength. The area it’s in, right where North Melbourne and West Melbourne rub up together, might just be the most vital dining destination in the city right now.

“After Covid, a lot of tired operators in the area decided not to renew their leases, and only local institutions stuck around,” Jones says. “So you’re left with a lot of older establishments that are still thriving, but there’s also been an injection of youth.”

Local icons like Warung Agus, Prudence, Little Africa, Char Siu House, Amiconi, the Town Hall and the Three Crowns sit alongside newcomers such as Udom House, Lumen, Bears, Whitebark and the refurbished Courthouse Hotel. Further along, there’s the likes of 279, Kare Curry, The Flour and Sanhe Congee.

The eye of the storm is the intersection of Errol Street and Victoria Street. In the last few weeks newcomers like Turkish restaurant Al Makan and Southern Italian spot Bar Taralli have joined the party. And then there’s the continued success of the Hot-Listed Earth Angels and Manzé.

North Melbourne is finally having its moment.

“We’ve been here for over 20 years, and this is definitely the most vibrant it’s ever been,” Tina Buchan says. “It’s always been this sleepy little neighbourhood, so close to the city, and I never knew why it hadn’t taken off.”

Buchan owns Pour Diane, a 70s-inspired wine bar on Victoria Street, with her husband Andy. The pair are long-time hospo figures (Andy is a former co-owner of Soi 38, and the couple own Harcourt’s Le Coq Door), and relished the chance to finally be able to open up somewhere in their own neck of the woods.

“The momentum is just here, and we wanted to open something fabulous where we lived,” Buchan says. “It’s a wonderful thing that’s happening to this area.”

“And of course, Manze has brought a lot of people to North Melbourne.”

The acclaimed Mauritian wine bar opened in late 2021, and it’s been instrumental to the new pep in the suburb’s step.

“There’s always been a really vibrant, exciting vibe to North Melbourne,” says journalist and Manze co-owner Osman Faruqi. “When we came in, we didn’t have any designs to change that or attract a different kind of clientele – we saw what was going on and we thought, ‘That’s what we want to be a part of.’”

“It feels silly to call it a hidden gem, but I still think it’s criminally underrated.”

According to Faruqi, one of the keys to North Melbourne’s recent culinary appeal isn’t just the quality of what’s on offer, it’s the breadth.

“North Melbourne is so steady, creative, hard-working and has a really diverse mix of food,” he says. “I don’t think it gets the respect or credit it deserves for the vast range of cultures you can enjoy here.”

Just over half of North Melbourne’s population was born outside of Australia, which has translated to a restaurant scene teeming with different cuisines to try.

And the lower rents compared to bigger nearby names like Fitzroy and Carlton also make it the perfect place for people low on funds to experiment with big ideas.

“North Melbourne didn’t just feel right because it’s where we culturally want to be, it’s also where we could afford to do it,” Faruqi. “If you’re overwhelmed by your rent payments, you have less opportunity to do something creative, so you can take more risks here than if you were trying to open in Fitzroy, the city or South Yarra.”

Favourable rents and an exciting blend of cultures might have lit the North Melbourne spark, but it’s the locals, thrilled to be able to go out and have a great meal and drink in their own neighbourhood, that have kept the fire burning.

This community is so warm and receptive to new things,” Faruqi says. “Even in this complicated and tough economy, you can make something fun that works here.”

www.broadsheet.com.au/hotlist/melbourne

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