• For a decade, Moroccan Soup Bar diners have scribbled love letters to the Melbourne restaurant on napkins. As it closes for good, they’re a heartwarming eulogy. Read our feature.

• These are Melbourne’s best cafe and fast-casual openings of 2022 (so far).

• Australia’s best bartender for 2022 has been announced – and it’s a Melburnian. Bar Liberty’s Nick Tesar will represent Australia in the global finals in September. Raise a glass.

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• Sad news for cake-lovers: Beatrix, one of Melbourne’s most-adored bakeries, will close next month. “I think I am a little puffed and need a hard break after 12 years.”

• Now open: in a ’50s chocolate factory, Frontside is a welcome new daytime diner for Port Melbourne – with breakfast-appropriate carbonara and fluffy tiramisu hotcakes.

• Bookmark this: 30 of Victoria’s best chefs under 30 share their favourite thing to eat in the state right now. Including epic souvas, fancified hash browns and what can only be described as “sandwich sorcery”. Intrigued?

• First Look: Everything revolves around shokupan at South Yarra’s new Japanese bakery Fuumi. Get the pillow-soft milk bread by the whole or half loaf, as a classic katsu sando, or slathered with peanut butter and brûléed banana.

• Behold: all the new Melbourne restaurant, cafe and bar openings we got excited about in June.

• Two of our favourite Melbourne restaurants – Lagoon and Congress – are coming together for one night only, on July 24. Congress’s famous pig’s-head sanga will get the Cantonese treatment and there’ll be Sichuan-style roo pastrami. Book online.

• Small room, big vibe: Icebergs’ Maurice Terzini and Mister Bianco’s Joe Vargetto open anticipated brutalist Italian diner Cucina Povera. They’ve gone back to their Italian roots, channelling the garages of their youth – where their families made wine, hung salami and had a hell of a time doing it.

• Shoot for the sky at Melbourne’s ritzy new CBD bar – with a “floating” outdoor lounge – 40 floors up.

• Korean dessert cafe Sulbing has opened a cute new takeaway window in the CBD. It’s serving pint-sized versions of its signature bingsu (a shaved-ice dessert), plus pastries, smoothies and other drinks.