• These are the restaurants, cafes and bars where Nigella Lawson (and other big-name Melbourne Food & Wine Festival guests) can’t wait to eat while they’re in town.

• “A glut of tartlets”: Attica’s tart table is filled with made-from-scratch creations in all sorts of flavours – from raspberry and white chocolate panna cotta to broccoli and avocado-oil jelly.

• Fancy a triple-decker Thai seafood feast – chargrilled lobster included? It's on at Ging Thai until the end of June.

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• Minimum spending, maximum snacking: how to do Melbourne Food & Wine Festival for $35 or less. Including a slick sushi train, a convenience store unlike any other and four-cheese spaghetti tossed in a 40-kilogram Grana Padano wheel.

• A mochi ice-cream bar, self-serve coffee and OJ, and pick’n’mix pet treats: a fancy new Coles Local opens in Melbourne.

• Peerless, strikingly angular new tea bar Yugen is now doing high tea. Differently. Find spring roll tarts, matcha and raspberry mousse, and more.

• Coming soon: Oasis is opening a Middle Eastern superstore on the Mornington Peninsula. And it’ll be even bigger than the beloved Murrumbeena original.

• At The Convenient Store, find a hulking deli-style “motherlode” sandwich stacked with cold-cuts and cheese from every single deli in Queen Victoria Market.

• How much is too much to pay for a cup of coffee? We hit the streets of Melbourne to find out. The verdict.

• Midnight tonkotsu ramen, a recently reborn Chinese institution (with excellent XO pippies) and a hidden pizza window: these are Melbourne’s best late-night eats.

• A crack team of hospo legends – including Tom Sarafian, Stokehouse’s Jason Staudt, French Saloon’s Ian Curley and food writer Dani Valent – is hosting a flood-relief fundraiser with roving snacks.

• Order the duck ragu gnocchi at a curvaceous new Richmond bar and mop up the sauce with bread or fries – “it’s like dipping into KFC gravy”.

• Explore every single level of a new mega-venue or go on a bar safari at this year's Melbourne Cocktail Festival.