The Best Places to Eat and Do in Australia

A converted old schoolhouse on a quiet road outside Byron, The Hut is a lunch spot that does Mediterranean food the way a long weekend should feel. Whitewashed walls, polished floors, and garden light filtering through big windows set a mood that's part coastal shack, part somewhere you'd actually eat well. The menu moves through Spanish, Greek, and Italian territory without a lot of fuss, and the Australian Good Food Guide awarded it a Chef Hat.

Open-air dining room perched at the edge of Hamilton Island, where the Coral Sea fills every window and the Whitsundays do most of the decorating. The Long Pavilion runs breakfast through dinner, Modern Australian menu in hand, moving from a tropical morning spread to sunset plates of kangaroo tartare and bay lobster while the light changes colour outside. A One Chef Hat pick from the Australian Good Food Guide, and a room that knows it has a view to live up to.

The Gold Coast Hinterland's forested ridgeline is the backdrop here, and the kitchen leans into that setting hard, pulling produce from nearby farms and the forest floor for a Modern Australian menu that sits somewhere between relaxed and formally ambitious. Think Wagyu, bay lobster, and foraged greens treated with quiet seriousness. The room reads like a farmhouse that tidied up for guests. It holds an Australian Good Food Guide Chef Hat.

The floor-to-ceiling windows frame Megalong Valley so dramatically it almost upstages the food. Set inside the historic Hydro Majestic Hotel, The Wintergarden is a European dinner restaurant that also does high tea, surrounded by ornate fireplaces and furnishings that lean hard into grand old mountain resort. The one Chef Hat from the Australian Good Food Guide confirms the kitchen is doing something more than scenery work.

Red gum from the Bendigo region does the real work here, burning in the wood grill and oven that give this refined steakhouse its whole reason for being. The menu runs wagyu, dry-aged rib eye, and premium grass-fed cuts, backed by a bar stocked with 28 wines by the glass and a seasonal cocktail list. An Australian Good Food Guide One Chef Hat. Dress up a little; the room expects it.

Floor-to-ceiling windows look out over Tamar Valley vineyards at this wood-fired Modern Australian restaurant beside Velo Wines, north of Launceston. The menu shifts constantly around what's grown nearby, including produce bartered from neighbors up the road, and the kitchen leans on fermentation and pickling to stretch the seasons. It holds an Australian Good Food Guide Hat. Lunch is the main event, relaxed and pastoral, with the smell of the fire doing half the talking.

A country pub that's been around forever in the Gippsland flatlands, Tinamba Hotel runs from a proper dining room and conservatory through to a casual bar and verandah, so you can dress it up or down depending on the mood. The kitchen leans hard into local produce, which in this corner of Victoria means excellent meat and dairy country. The Australian Good Food Guide has given it a Chef Hat, which in a town this size feels like a quiet act of defiance.

A Surry Hills spot where Australian and Asian cooking get folded into each other in ways that feel less like fusion and more like a genuine point of view. The menu shifts familiar territory into something harder to categorize, which is either exciting or unsettling depending on your mood. The room is small enough that the kitchen's curiosity feels personal. It holds a Chef Hat from the Australian Good Food Guide.

The open kitchen sends smoke and char into a sleek dining room of soft light and dark wood on Miller Street in North Sydney. Toki is a fusion bistro and bar where the menu leans toward big-format sharing, think tomahawk steaks and beef tartare dressed with tendon crisps and caviar. The cocktail bar pulls its own weight. The Australian Good Food Guide awarded it a Chef Hat.

A renovated corner store in the heritage-listed village of Millthorpe, with white-clothed tables, polished wood floors, and lighting turned low enough that everyone looks like they're up to something. Tonic is a set-menu dinner spot running a five-course chef's choice format, so you're along for the ride, which in this case includes local truffles and regional wine pairings. The Australian Good Food Guide awards it a Chef Hat.

Inside Maffco Brewery and Distillery, TUCKA is a farm-to-fork restaurant that takes Gippsland's seasonal produce seriously enough to keep the menu in constant motion. The kitchen leans hard into what the region grows and raises, so what you order depends entirely on when you show up, which is more or less the point. An Australian Good Food Guide One Chef Hat restaurant out in the Gippsland countryside, which is its own kind of argument.

A Pisco Sour is the obvious opening move at this Peruvian restaurant inside the Pan Pacific Perth, and the room, all grey matte walls, blond timber, and terracotta tile, gives you somewhere calm to drink it. The menu moves through ceviche, grilled octopus, and wood-kissed meat dishes, tracing the coasts and highlands without turning it into a geography lesson. One Chef Hat from the Australian Good Food Guide.

A contemporary Indian restaurant tucked into a resort-like setting on the edge of the Northern Beaches, Urban Tadka moves through regional Indian cooking with a modern hand. The room runs from casual dinners to full celebration mode, with lounge areas and a proper bar alongside the dining spaces. It holds a One Chef Hat from the Australian Good Food Guide, and the menu leans into sharing, which suits the warm, unhurried pace of the place.

The restaurant takes its name from the Japanese word for a Western chef's knife, which tells you something about where this place sits, one foot in Japanese tradition, the other in the cooking-obsessed Sydney dining scene. It's a considered, sit-down Japanese restaurant in sleepy Clovelly, and the kitchen leans hard on local produce while keeping the cooking precise and unfussy. The kind of room where people are there to eat, not to be seen.

Parked right on Lake Burley Griffin with the water close enough that you feel slightly guilty checking your phone, Water's Edge is a polished Modern Australian restaurant where seasonal produce gets a quiet nudge from French technique and Mediterranean habit. The room reads special-occasion, though regulars treat it as a comfortable Wednesday. An Australian Good Food Guide Chef Hat acknowledges the kitchen's ambitions, which are considerable for a Canberra lakeside address.

The beer garden wraps around a wood oven and an Argentine-style grill, which tells you something about the ambitions of this old Clare Valley pub. Much of the produce comes from the hotel's own organic farm down the road, and the kitchen runs everything from a casual a la carte to a six-course degustation. The Australian Good Food Guide has given it a Chef Hat, and the setting, a lovingly restored country hotel, makes it easy to stay longer than planned.

Fine dining inside a working winery estate, with the manicured gardens of The Llawn rolling out beyond the windows. The team pairs a modern Australian tasting menu and à la carte with the estate's own wines, which is a convenient arrangement when the wines are this good. The Swan Valley setting does a lot of the heavy lifting, and the kitchen seems content to match it rather than compete, leaning on seasonal produce and clean technique.

Soft lighting, warm tones, and a menu that leans hard into classic French bistro cooking occupy a quiet stretch of Arthur Street in Fortitude Valley. Winnifred's is the kind of place where a long lunch with a decent Burgundy seems not just reasonable but necessary. Steaks get proper sauces, seafood is treated without fuss, and the room manages to feel polished without making you nervous about your shoes.

Glossy black finishes and low lighting set the mood at this contemporary Japanese restaurant inside Surfers Paradise's QT Hotel. The menu runs the izakaya staples: sashimi, sushi, and kushiyaki from the grill, all built for sharing. A focused list of Japanese whisky, sake, and cocktails keeps pace with the food. The Gold Coast isn't the first place you'd expect a moody Tokyo-ish dining room, which is sort of the point.

Marble bench tops and pendant lighting set the tone at this Modern Australian restaurant on Port Douglas's main corner, where the menu leans into local seafood and Far North Queensland produce. It reads as the kind of place where you could go on a date or a group dinner and neither party would feel shortchanged. The Australian Good Food Guide has given it a Chef Hat.

A wood-fired oven anchors this cozy Neapolitan pizzeria tucked into a quiet residential pocket well clear of Melbourne's centre, where the streets are low and leafy and the pace is considerably calmer. The pasta pulls as much weight as the pizza here, a combination rare enough that 50 Top Pizza handed it a Best Pasta Proposal award, alongside a ranking of 28th in the world. The kitchen imports Italian ingredients seriously and handles dietary needs without making a fuss about it.

A corner pizza restaurant in a Victorian terrace in Balmain, with sidewalk tables when the weather cooperates and a line out the door when it doesn't. The chef obsesses over fermentation and dough in a way that reads less like trend-chasing and more like a genuine fixation, and the extra virgin olive oil gets its own casting credit across the menu. 50 Top Pizza Asia-Pacific has it at number three.

Parquet floors, potted palms, and glossy wood veneer set the scene for this CBD restaurant doing a Sydney riff on the New York steakhouse, with Art Nouveau-inspired artwork on the walls and ice-cold martinis on the tables. The team blends retro Upper East Side opulence with Aussie sensibilities, so old-school Americana sits alongside modish local touches on the menu. The kind of place where the room does half the work before the food arrives.

A family-owned winery in Margaret River with an art gallery on the grounds and a restaurant that earns its own visit. The estate runs seasonal jazz evenings and arts dinners, so checking the calendar before you go is less optional than it sounds. Perth is an hour away by air, which the kind of people who plan ahead tend to take literally. A 50 Discovery from The 50 list.

An urban winery visit where the highlight is a dimly lit underground cellar and a story involving corporate sabotage. In the 1950s, the winemaker Max Schubert was ordered to stop his experiments; he kept going anyway, hiding bottles in these very cellars. That wine, Grange, later became Australia's priciest bottle ever sold at auction. The tour opens at the founders' original cottage before moving underground, where the contraband legacy of one stubborn winemaker is very much the point.

You ring a bell to get in, which either sounds precious or exactly right once you're seated inside this converted Gold Rush bank in the Victorian high country. The restaurant runs a multi-course tasting menu with a Japanese lean, built around hyper-local produce. About eighteen small plates arrive in four bento-style rounds, and the cooking is precise without being cold. A Discovery listing from The 50 puts it on the national map.

An old-school Hunter Valley estate that has been shaping Australian Semillon longer than most wineries have existed, Tyrrell's offers structured tastings from a casual introduction to the range all the way up to vertical deep-dives on their flagship VAT 1. The Sacred Sites experience takes you through the actual vineyard blocks before you taste what came out of them. Bookings are essential, and the family occasionally shows up, which is either charming or slightly terrifying depending on your threshold.

A specialty coffee shop sitting on George Street in the Sydney CBD, where the rotating single-origin lineup changes with the seasons and the baristas treat espresso as a verb, not a noun. The room is sleek without being fussy, which suits the lunchtime office crowd well enough, but it also has the quiet patience of a place where nobody will rush you.

A converted warehouse painted almost entirely white, with the roastery sitting in plain view so nothing happens behind closed doors. This specialty coffee shop in Collingwood leans hard into light roasts and single origins, the kind of place where the coffee is the décor. It draws the pour-over crowd who treat their morning brew with the same seriousness other people reserve for wine, which is either admirable or a lot, depending on your Tuesday.

The name is a timer: dough ferments for 48 hours before it ever sees a flame, which gives the crust at this Neapolitan-style pizzeria in South Yarra its particular lightness. Exposed red brick, an informal room, and a menu that splits into classic, gourmet, and seasonal pies, including one topped with kangaroo salami and macadamia pesto via a collaboration with Aboriginal producers. Homemade gnocchi round things out. It ranked 93rd on 50 Top Pizza World.

A specialty coffee shop from the Industry Beans roaster, tucked into the CBD on Little Collins. The room is clean and minimal in that way Melbourne cafes do well, with the coffee doing the talking instead. Beans are sourced globally and rotated, so the pour-over today probably isn't the pour-over next month. The kind of place where laptop workers and CBD regulars coexist without anyone making a fuss about it.

A custom espresso machine sits at the center of this light-filled, timber-accented specialty coffee shop on Little Lonsdale Street, doing the work a piece of art usually does. It's the CBD flagship for Padre Coffee, which means the beans rotating through are seasonal single origins alongside the house blends, and the baristas know the difference. The kind of place where a flat white on the run and a slow pour-over get the same careful attention.

Wood paneling, shelves of records, and specialty coffee by day shifting to natural wine and cocktails once the sun goes down: Good Measure on Lygon Street is the kind of cafe-bar hybrid Melbourne does better than anywhere. The espresso is serious, and the Mont Blanc, a chilled filter coffee floated with sweet cream, has the devoted following to prove it. Come back at night and the room barely changes, which is the whole point.

A specialty coffee shop where ordering feels less like grabbing a flat white and more like sitting a sommelier exam, except the sommelier is excited to explain everything. The minimalist bar on Victoria Street runs omakase-style tastings through rare microlots and competition-grade beans, with staff who can map a pour-over's origin and processing method from memory. Bring curiosity; a laptop feels slightly beside the point.

A specialty coffee shop tucked into King Street in the CBD, Skittle Lane keeps things spare and deliberate, the kind of minimalist fit-out that makes you notice the coffee instead of the furniture. The focus is on single-origin brews alongside pastries for when a flat white alone feels insufficient. Office workers on a tight clock and laptop regulars settling in for the afternoon tend to coexist without much friction.

A converted warehouse down a graffiti-tagged South Melbourne laneway, ST. ALi is a specialty coffee roaster and all-day café that has been part of Melbourne's coffee furniture long enough to have trained half the baristas in the city. The space runs loud and industrial, the roasting operation sits in plain sight, and the breakfast crowd tends to arrive with opinions about extraction. Come for the coffee; the food menu is serious enough to make that harder than it sounds.

Pastel pinks and baby blues in the middle of Melbourne's CBD, which is either a very confident design choice or a dare. This coffee shop on Exhibition Street leans hard into retro-resort kitsch while roasting its own beans with complete seriousness, running the range from espresso blends to single-origin pour-overs. The suits filing past the window make the whole setup funnier, which seems intentional.

Roman-style pizza by the slice in a small, pretty room on one of Surry Hills' better streets, with a courtyard that fills up when the weather cooperates. The dough gets a long ferment, which gives it the structure to carry serious toppings drawn from Italian regional traditions without going soggy. Appetizers, salads, a pasta or two, and desserts round things out. The cocktail list gets more attention than you'd expect from a slice shop.

A wood-fired Neapolitan pizza shop in Cronulla, right where the Sydney suburbs give way to beach town. The family runs the floor with the kind of unhurried attention you can't hire in, and the dough, soft and properly charred from the oven, does the heavy lifting. Red pies and white pies share the menu alongside salads and a tiramisu that no one is skipping. It ranked 25th on the 50 Top Pizza Asia-Pacific list, which checks out.