What we covered in Melbourne food and drink this week
• Melissa Leong invites us into her home for afternoon tea, shares a “foolproof” cake recipe and waxes lyrical about her favourite Melbourne pastries.

• Charming daytime diner Elster opens in a Tudor-style 1930s service station.

• Gary’s Meats transforms with a luxe new flagship, G McBean Family Butcher, at Prahran Market.

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• Brunswick East’s favourite Italian sandwich shop, Stefanino Panino, is moving to Collingwood Yards.

• Broadsheet writers pick their favourite dishes in Melbourne right now.

• Sleepy’s Cafe and Wine Bar chef Steve Chan reveals his favourite banh mi joint, tells us why he loves La Pinta and shares two of the city’s best spots for a first date.

• Sunda, the Punch Lane restaurant formerly helmed by chef Khanh Nguyen, reopens with an up-and-coming alum returning to lead the kitchen.

• All the new Melbourne restaurant, cafe and bar openings we got excited about last month.

• What’s the right way to store chocolate? Can you temper it without a thermometer? Pastry chef Kristen Tibballs answers all of our nerdy chocolate questions.

• Aussie “hot girl food” (read: craft tinned fish) is now available in Melbourne.

• Food for Everyone’s third poster series turns a Nigella Lawson cake, a Mali Bakes roll and more into art.

You might have missed
• Local label Hommey dishes up a range of tea towels and aprons in shades like matcha, pink lemonade and vanilla bean.

Listen up
• This week on Broadsheet podcast Around Town we talk about seven exciting restaurants and bars opening before the end of the year, break down Melbourne’s Thai restaurant boom, and discuss Australia’s best and weirdest Martinis (and why the drink has made such a comeback).

More, please
• There’s a new fried chicken sandwich in town. Warkop Melbourne – a casual CBD sandwich shop known for serving up Aussie cafe favourites with Indonesian flair – has added a fried chicken sandwich with kohlrabi, pickles and its signature “Bazzinga sauce” to the menu.

• Piccolina Gelateria has released a limited-edition Christmas pudding that riffs on a classic rocky road. The showstopper pudding layers chocolate, fior di latte, and salted caramel gelato, vanilla-bean marshmallows, and raspberry jelly on a mud cake base.

• Gelato Messina has opened a new store in Malvern. South-siders can drop in for classic flavours like chocolate mint and Italian nougat, vegan sorbets and gelato cakes.

• The summer terrace at Society, Chris Lucas’s high-flying Collins Street restaurant, is now open. And there’ll be al fresco DJ sets every Friday and Saturday from 6pm to 10pm.

• Two Aussie beverage brands – non-alc brewers Heaps Normal and soda company Yumbo – have teamed up on a new zero-ABV beer called Tough Stuff Shandy. It combines the brewery’s non-alcoholic beer with the soft-drink maker’s lemonade.

As seen on the web
• A quarter of a million US dollars worth of rare Japanese Kit Kats have gone missing. How? – via The New York Times.