The Best Places in Australia

Pale wood, glossy tiles, and floor-to-ceiling glass set the scene at this modern Japanese restaurant on Bunda Street. The kitchen runs a robata grill alongside composed plates that lean heavily on yuzu, miso, and Japanese seasoning traditions applied to local produce. The Australian Good Food Guide awarded it Two Chef Hats. Canberra's dining scene gets underestimated often enough that a room this sharp-looking still catches people off guard.

The seafood on your plate was swimming off this island's shore a few hours earlier, which sets the tone for the whole experience. Samphire is the fine-dining restaurant at this private island retreat on the Eyre Peninsula, where Mediterranean flavors meet foraged coastal ingredients in a room of rattan chairs and polished concrete. The Australian Good Food Guide awards it two Chef Hats, and it earns them quietly, without fuss.

Named after a lavender town north of Marseille, Sault sits on a working lavender farm outside Daylesford, overlooking its own lake and the Wombat State Forest. It's a modern Australian fine-dining room where the kitchen draws from onsite gardens and local producers, changing the menu each season. The two Chef Hats from the Australian Good Food Guide suggest the cooking is doing more than trading on the view, which, it should be said, is doing quite a lot of the work.

A plant-only Sichuan restaurant in an industrial Collingwood space, Shu has been quietly dismantling the assumption that vegan dining means polite and beige. The kitchen leans into the bold, numbing heat of southwest Chinese cooking, and the ten-course degustation does the convincing. There's also a cocktail bar tucked inside, which helps explain the crowd's relaxed commitment to staying a while. The Australian Good Food Guide gives it two Chef Hats.

Neon signs, Japanese-style murals, and wooden furniture set the tone at this share-plates Asian restaurant on Weyba Road, where the room feels like a group project between four very opinionated friends. The cooking pulls across Southeast and East Asia without apology, landing somewhere between playful and serious, which is roughly the same place the cocktail list sits. An Australian Good Food Guide Two Chef Hat spot that doesn't feel like one, in the best, most accidental way.

Sixteen seats, a cave-dark room of blackened steel and raw timber, and a Korean omakase menu that changes with the seasons. SUUM is the kind of quiet, focused dining room where you arrive, accept a glass of housemade makgeolli with a snack, and hand the evening over to the kitchen. The two Chef Hat tasting menu runs a dozen or so courses, rooted in Korean tradition and clearly comfortable straying from it.

Vineyard views through the dining room windows mean you're watching what's on your plate grow a few hundred metres away. This is a formal, sit-down restaurant on the Mornington Peninsula doing European-leaning seasonal cooking with a two Chef Hat nod from the Australian Good Food Guide. The wine list leans heavily into the estate's own bottles, which is either charming or convenient depending on how you feel about that sort of thing.

White tablecloths and rattan chairs look out over the Sunshine Coast Hinterland from the terrace of this fine dining room tucked into the hills above Montville. The kitchen leans French, drawing on local produce to run a seasonally shifting menu, and the pacing is deliberately unhurried. The Australian Good Food Guide has given it two Chef Hats, and the drive up the escarpment is half the point.

A stone fireplace anchors the dining room while the Great Dividing Range fills the windows, which is a reasonable way to set expectations for a meal. This is a fine dining restaurant inside a mountain lodge, running a contemporary Australian menu that leans on regional produce and native flavours. The Australian Good Food Guide has given it Two Chef Hats. At over 1,100 metres up, the terrace sunsets arrive uninvited and stay too long.

An open timber pavilion set in the rainforest above Maleny, with the kitchen running Thai-rooted contemporary Asian cuisine and a degustation menu for anyone who wants the full tour. The food trades in the kind of sweet, sour, and spicy balancing act that looks simple and isn't. Two Chef Hats from the Australian Good Food Guide. The retreat around it is lovely, but the restaurant is the reason to book.

A restored heritage house on the Tweed River, with pressed tin ceilings, palm fans, and a verandah that looks straight out at Wollumbin. This is a plantation-style bistro running a proper Modern Australian menu, the kind of place where lunch can quietly become afternoon. The Australian Good Food Guide gave it two Chef Hats. Come on a weekend when the lawn bar is open and the cane fields are green, and the pacing feels less like a meal than a small argument for slowing down.

The 23-foot woven ceiling in the lobby sets the tone: this is a resort hotel that took Western Australia's landscape as a design brief and followed it all the way to a lagoon pool and an 8,000-piece ceramic mosaic behind reception. Rooms are polished, service is formal without being stiff, and the whole complex sits minutes from the city. Forbes Four Star. Pack accordingly.

Two heritage buildings, an Art Deco pub and a Victorian-era brewery HQ, joined by enclosing the alleyway between them: that's the physical logic of this boutique hotel in Chippendale, just south of the CBD. The architects kept the industrial patina and layered in genuinely considered luxury. The Clare Bar runs a high-design pub vibe downstairs, and the rooftop handles cocktails and the kind of al fresco evening that makes Sydney feel like it's showing off.

A century-old department store and theatre, now a hotel that treats restraint as a personal affront. QT Sydney cranks the Art Deco glamour and historical color so high you half expect a flapper to step out of the elevator. Rooms are deeply, unapologetically theatrical, bathrooms especially lavish. Downstairs, the Gowings Bar and Grill and Gilt Lounge pull in enough stylish locals to remind you the CBD has a pulse. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Concrete walls, lacquered red accents, and lobby installations by local artists signal that this Fitzroy hotel is trying to be something other than a hotel. The StandardX is the group's first offshoot property, and it wears the neighborhood's warehouse-bar energy without much effort. The rooftop pours cocktails over Melbourne skyline views, and Bang downstairs runs seasonal plates with local wine. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A boutique hotel in Surry Hills, back when the neighborhood was all vinyl record shops and gallery openings with no obvious place to sleep. The 35 rooms mix Art Deco bones with a modern addition and some genuinely charming touches, like Japanese tea sets and marble bathrooms stocked with Molton Brown. A rooftop deck handles the views. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Two historic buildings share a postcode and a renovation: a sandstone pile from the 1800s and a 1940s Art Deco building, now stitched together into one of Hobart's grander hotels. The Tasman, a Luxury Collection Hotel, holds the Michelin Guide's one Key. Rooms run luxurious and the public spaces are generous, with an Italian restaurant, a lounge, and a craft cocktail bar named Mary Mary doing their bit for the cause.

Perched on View Point in central Bendigo, Alium is a modern Australian restaurant built around seasonal produce and a dining room that actually feels like it wants you there. The menu shifts with what's good rather than what's expected, and the team runs service with enough warmth to soften even the most reluctant regional-city dinner guest. An Australian Good Food Guide One Chef Hat restaurant.

Every table looks out over Windsor's Edge Vineyard, which makes it hard to focus on the menu, though the kitchen holds its own with Modern Australian cooking that earns the restaurant an Australian Good Food Guide Chef Hat. In warmer months, the verandah is the obvious move; in winter, the fireplace inside picks up the slack. Hunter Valley wines feature heavily, as you'd expect from a fully licensed restaurant sitting directly above the vines.

The nightly degustation menu changes around whatever you tell the chef you want to eat, which is either a dream or a mild anxiety, depending on how decisive you are. This intimate private kitchen in a West Leederville close seats a small room beneath softly glowing pendants and a stacked stone open counter, and the Asian cooking is precise enough to hold an Australian Good Food Guide Chef Hat.

The wine list runs to over 200 bottles, with forty-odd available by the glass, which tells you what Annata is really about before you've even looked at the food menu. It's a modern European bistro on the Lower North Shore, the kind of neighbourhood place where the kitchen sends out precise seasonal cooking and the room genuinely expects you to linger. The alfresco garden is dog-friendly, the set menu comes with wine pairings built in, and locals treat it like a second living room.

White tablecloths, chandelier lighting, and walls hung with artwork set the tone at this Italian restaurant in North Sydney, where the menu leans on tradition without pretending the last few decades of cooking didn't happen. The room is housed in a heritage building that gives it the kind of bones a fit-out budget alone can't buy. It holds an Australian Good Food Guide Chef Hat.

Named for the Pitjantjatjara word for bush plum, this grill room sits inside Ayers Rock Resort with ghost gums pressing against the windows and Uluru somewhere just beyond them. It's a proper sit-down Modern Australian restaurant, working native ingredients like desert lime and wattleseed into seasonal à la carte plates and firing serious cuts over the grill. The Australian Good Food Guide awards it a Chef Hat, which is a reasonable thing to earn this far from anywhere.

The ancient ironbark oven in the corner runs the show at this intimate restaurant and wine bar in Blackheath, lending everything on the table a convincing argument for open-fire cooking. The menu is Mediterranean share plates built around local produce, with Blue Mountains wines and beer filling in the rest. Mountain villages aren't usually this good at sitting still, but the room earns it.

Alfresco tables catch the Gold Coast sun at this Mediterranean share-plate bar on Panitz Street, where the wine list is tightly edited and the menu is built for grazing rather than deliberating. Small plates lean coastal, raw fish and fried seafood sit alongside grilled skewers and a shareable T-bone, with Basque cheesecake to close. The Australian Good Food Guide awarded it a Chef Hat.

Marble counters meet raw hardwood on the fifth floor of a North Sydney hotel, setting the scene for a wine bar and all-day Italian restaurant that leans into Italo-Australian cooking: pasta with native Davidson plum, burrata alongside local persimmon. The room is polished without being stiff, and the menu moves comfortably from a working breakfast through to sharing plates over a bottle in the evening.

Vineyard views stretch out from the dining room at this cellar-door restaurant on the Mornington Peninsula, where the wine list draws from grapes grown on the property itself. The kitchen runs a modern Australian menu built around estate produce and regional seasonals, the kind of place where the sourcing conversation happens before you've ordered. An Australian Good Food Guide One Chef Hat sits on the record.

A little penguin colony shares the Bass Strait oceanfront with dinner guests at this farm-to-table restaurant perched above the North-West coastline. The kitchen works from the family property's volcanic soil, so the menu shifts with whatever the land is actually doing that week. Modern Australian cooking, refined enough for a special occasion but grounded in the kind of produce that makes the mainland jealous. One Chef Hat from the Australian Good Food Guide.

Tables at Beach Byron Bay look directly onto Clarkes Beach, which means the ocean does a lot of the decorating before the food even arrives. It's a waterfront restaurant leaning on Northern Rivers produce, with a menu that shifts with the season, so the kitchen has a built-in excuse to keep things interesting. The wine list is sommelier-curated, and a casual kiosk handles daytime drop-ins for those who can't commit to a full sit-down.

Red velvet booths, blue velvet seating, and a Champagne garden facing the Esplanade, all under one roof at this Italian restaurant inside the Pacific Beach Resort in Mooloolaba. The kitchen leans into Sunshine Coast produce and seafood from the nearby port, turning them into the kind of composed, plated dishes that earned a One Chef Hat from the Australian Good Food Guide. Dress a little, linger over pasta, and let someone else worry about the drive home.

The char-grill does most of the talking at this casual seafood restaurant and bar in Port Macquarie, where the menu runs from fresh oysters to whole baked fish and keeps things deliberately uncomplicated. An all-NSW wine list and local craft beer on tap back it up. The room has the kind of easy, good-looking design that works equally well for a post-work drink, a shared feast, or something that quietly tips into a special occasion.

Blond wood, cane pendant lights, and actual sunlight make this Pan-Asian restaurant and bar in Coolangatta feel like someone finally figured out that beach towns deserve interesting food. It's the sibling of Ally Chow up the coast, with a menu built around sharing, running from kingfish sashimi through to charcoal-cooked miso toothfish. An Australian Good Food Guide One Chef Hat keeps it honest.

A European-Australian bistro a short walk from Circular Quay, Bistro George holds an Australian Good Food Guide Hat and pitches itself at the full range: solo bar snacks, work lunches, leisurely dinners. The menu leans on local produce and lands somewhere between Continental and modern Australian, with a wine list broad enough to keep both the table orderer and the sommelier-curious happy.