• At Big Esso, Mabu Mabu chef-owner Nornie Bero’s new all-day diner, it’s all about Torres Strait Islander food. That means tamarind pippies, buckets of chargrilled prawns and more.

• Bookmark this: Melbourne’s best cafe openings of 2021 (so far).

• Turning four years of anticipation into action, Chris Lucas’s Society emerges as the culinary tour de force we were expecting.

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• Bar Romantica’s ripper lockdown 5.0 takeaway pivot, The Pizzetta Shop, is sticking around. Because there should be no end to tiny pizzas topped with great big balls of burrata.

• There’s no rudimentary parma at the reborn – and reimagined – Penny Black, now Penny’s. Instead: a pork rib-eye katsu the size of your face. It’s panko-crumbed and crisscrossed with Kewpie and katsu sauce.

• For two days only, North Melbourne’s Beatrix is doing a limited-edition babka with peanut-and-chocolate butter courtesy of Pic’s and Whittaker’s.

• Register to try Heston Blumenthal’s off-menu burger collab. It comes to your table under a smoke-filled cloche (of course).

• “The current Covid-19 restrictions do not allow us to run the program in its intended format”: Melbourne Food & Wine Festival postpones its winter edition.

• Coming soon: The Keys, an enormous, nostalgic “leisure centre” – with three bars, 12 retro bowling lanes and room for 650 punters. It’s by two of the guys behind Dexter, Takeaway Pizza and Dom’s.

• A Melbourne chef is selling hefty chai-spiced cinnamon scrolls smeared with decadent, also-chai-spiced cream-cheese icing. Just look at them.

• Recipe: the golden rule you must follow to make the best hummus of your life, according to one of the country's best Middle Eastern chefs.

• Front-row seats (and $6 skewers) rule at Robata, the San Telmo Group’s new charcoal-fired Japanese joint. (It’s in a spot you’ll recognise.)