There’s no such thing as a “best” restaurant. We know. But every year Melbourne sees new openings that feel like gifts to the city and are worth celebrating with extreme fanfare and impossible-to-live-up-to words like “best”. This year was no exception. From a next-gen destination diner to a 10-day-old Fitzroy gem for Indian comfort food and a dreamy new Abbotsford Convent spot, here are 10 of our favourite new restaurants (as well as some honourable mentions and audience picks).

Alta Trattoria is based on the humble trattorias in Piedmont, north-west Italy, where the menus are simple and the wine is abundant. It’s the realisation of a concept by restaurateur Carlo Grossi (Ombra Salumi, Grossi Florentino) and sommelier James Tait (King and Godfree), who are joined here by chef McKay Wilday and restaurant manager Luke Drum. “I cook like a nonna, but I plate up like a Michelin chef,” Wilday told Broadsheet at the start of the year.

Here, he’s serving up nonna-style dishes like pasta with rabbit ragu, spatchcock with polenta and silverbeet and whole roasted lamb rump served with lentil and pancetta.

Julianne Blum was the head chef at Cam’s Kiosk for six years before owner Cam Miller persuaded her to take the job as executive chef at his new Abbotsford Convent restaurant. (He also persuaded the low-key chef to allow the restaurant to be named for her).

The pair then had the stroke of genius to hire Stephannie Liu as head chef, and the result is an elegant restaurant featuring some of the city’s best seasonal, produce-driven cooking. Most of the restaurant’s vegetables and herbs come from the kitchen garden tended by Cate Della Bosca, and standout dishes include Blum’s octopus ragu made using ring-shaped pasta and Liu’s snapper with a ginger and shallot sauce.

A wispy tower of whipped butter sits by the pass (and is served with house-made dinner rolls) in the pale-yellow tiled dining room and the patio is perfect for long lunches on sunny Sundays.

This hit pop-up from Stavros Konis and Con Christopoulos was only supposed to last until the end of winter. But after captivating Melbourne diners with its hearty, home-style Greek food, they decided to keep it open until the end of 2023, and will be moving to a permanent home in the new year. (The last day in its current location is Saturday December 30.)

Based on the casual cafes of Athens (“kafenio” is the Greek term for a traditional coffee house), the menu is nostalgic and unfussy, with fried sweetbreads, salty dips, free crusty white bread, slow-roasted lamb, bright Greek salads and carafes of wine.

When Korean-born chef Hansol Lee started working at revered Melbourne restaurant Kenzan, he didn’t know a single word of Japanese. He stayed on for a decade, including five years working the tempura station. This experience is evident at Matsu, the four-seat Footscray restaurant he owns with business and life partner Elly Hong. Hansol means pine tree in Korean – and matsu means the same in Japanese.

Together the couple serves kaiseki, a traditional Japanese multi-course meal format that involves small, intricate seasonal dishes, following a specific order and structure. Matsu is only open for two seatings four nights a week, with new slots released on a month-by-month basis (at midnight on the final day of each month).

Apart from the one-man show of prepping, cooking, slicing and serving sashimi and other dishes, Lee doesn’t miss a beat interacting with his diners. A sake pairing is optional, but if you’ve gone to the effort of securing a booking, it’s something we emphatically encourage

When the first Australian outpost for this revered Tokyo ramen chain opened in Melbourne last winter, there were lines around the block. Fans were flocking as a result of Mensho blowing up on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu – and also because of the restaurant’s signature tori paitan ramen, which takes over 30 hours to develop its flavour and is served with fresh house-made noodles and topped with duck char siu. It’s one of six types of ramen on offer at the 28-seat CBD spot, the others being “garlic knock out”, fiery lamb, vegan tantanmen, green tea ramen and Wagyu ramen, which is limited to just 20 bowls per day.

Two chef-partners with Michelin star credentials brought a next-gen destination diner to Warragul this year. Jodie Odrowaz and Michael Clarke met while working in the kitchen at Vue de Monde. They then worked together at Michelin-starred London restaurants including The Square and Gordon Ramsay’s Petrus, and both staged at Dan Barber’s influential restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York.

The duo’s unfussy cooking shows off some of Gippsland’s finest produce and takes cues from classic French and Italian cuisine. Standouts that make Messmates worth the drive include a comforting half roast chicken; chicken liver parfait with quince; and tagliatelle tossed through green sauce.

The restaurant is a family affair, and the two chefs are joined by Odrowaz’s brother and sister-in-law Chris and Jess Odrowaz, who manage the front of house and curated the 100-plus-bottle wine list.

Women took centrestage this year when it came to Melbourne’s Thai restaurants, with new venues serving region-specific cuisine across Melbourne. Three of them opened within months of one another: Boonruxsa Sangmanee and Masarat Bumrungpongsinchai’s Phuket-focused Pa Tong Thai on Flinders Lane; Jirada Ponpetch and chef Saifon Wichian’s Isan-street-food-inspired Thai Baan at the top end of Bourke Street; and Nora Thai.

Nora Thai stands out for its fiery dishes and nondescript neighbourhood feel. The South Yarra spot, hidden away just off the busy Toorak Road restaurant strip, is run by friends Thunyaluk “Palmmy” Aninpukkanuntin and Duangdao “Kana” Bannakorn. They both grew up in Surat Thani province on the Gulf of Thailand, but only met after moving to Australia, where they lived together as roommates. Their restaurant showcases southern Thai dishes they missed from home but struggled to find in Melbourne.

Staying true to their southern Thai roots, most of the dishes here are spicy. The dry red curry with minced pork could blow your head off if you don’t have the sense to also order a Thai beer or iced tea (or ask Aninpukkanuntin and Bannakorn to make it mild, which they’ll happily do).

Like Gimlet and Grill Americano before it, Reine brings a bigger-city energy to Melbourne. The Nomad team’s grand 140-seat diner in the former Melbourne Stock Exchange’s 132-year-old Cathedral Room opened to much fanfare at the beginning of August and has sustained the excitement since.

The dining room, with its stained-glass windows, gothic vaulted ceilings, limestone walls and solid granite columns, is in one of the most impressive rooms in Melbourne. Dual bars, each occupying a long side of the rectangular room, are Reine’s defining new features. The cocktail bar to the right, made of Italian red marble, is reserved for walk-ins who want Manhattans and Martinis stirred right in front of them. The bookable raw bar to the left, lined with glistening, ice-filled stainless-steel gutters, is for people who want Pacific and Sydney rock oysters shucked right in front of them. Both bars are on raised sub-floors that are built off-site and plonked on the ornate tiled floor sans fixings, with services running underneath.

And once dessert’s done, you can head over to La Rue, the New York-inspired eight-seat sibling bar behind the restaurant where the focus is on classic cocktails like the Manhattan and the Martini, and wines imported from the United States.

Toddy Shop opened just under two weeks ago, but chef Mischa Tropp has long been championing the kind of home-style Keralan cuisine on offer there during his hit stint at The Rochester Hotel and in-demand We Are Kerala pop-ups.

The menu at the laid-back Fitzroy spot features rotating mains like dry pork or beef fry (pieces of meat cooked in lots of spices and their own juices until “caramelised and bouncy”) and fiery fish nadan (a traditional and spicy fish curry). Plus, a selection of completely vegetarian mainstays like kadala (a chickpea curry cooked with coconut and mustard seeds), Tropp’s mum’s cabbage thoran (stir-fried cabbage with coconut, turmeric and curry leaves) and flaky paratha flatbread. Cocktails including a boozy Darjeeling Iced Tea for two incorporate Indian flavours and the street-facing window at the front of the shop is a great place to stand and linger while you finish them off after dinner.

Ali Atay is the executive chef and owner of Halikarnas, a Brunswick East Turkish restaurant that opened in 2021 and serves dishes “rooted in tradition” including karniyarik (stuffed eggplant) and cacik (a Turkish yoghurt dip).

Across the street is Yakamoz Mediterranean, a restaurant Atay and his son Ogulcan Atay opened earlier this year. At this sibling, the traditional dishes found at Halikarnas are often given a playful contemporary spin.

Most commonly coming out of the restaurant’s woodfired oven is pide, a Turkish flatbread topped with things like minced beef; spinach and herbs; and pastirma and egg. But there’s also crisp manti, pan-fried kefalotyri cheese and desserts like sweet rice pudding and candied pumpkin.

The drinks menu places just as much emphasis on the Mediterranean. There’s ayran, a popular Turkish yoghurt drink; Turkish soft drinks by Uludag Gazoz; Turkish coffee; and a fermented turnip drink called salgam.

This year we experienced sky-high dining in the breathtaking dining room at the 80th-floor Ritz Carlton restaurant Atria and the newly renovated and reopened Vue de Monde on the 55th floor of the Rialto Tower.

Meanwhile, the wine-bar-restaurant hybrid proved an enduring concept with Lilac Wine Bar and Bar Magnolia opening up.

South Yarra got a new omakase spot in Aoi Tsuki; Sydney export Yan brought an Asian-inspired smokehouse to the suburb; and CDMX saw the tacos and tostadas of Mexico City hit Brunswick.

Two spots, Thai Baan and Antara 128, got us into the CBD, while City Fields at Chadstone gave us a new reason to board the bus to the fashion capital.

Broadsheet readers loved stories on Da Bruno, Enoteca Boccacio, pizza spots Grazia and Pizzeria Magma, Studio Amaro, Stix and the revamped Studley Park Boathouse.

Additional reporting by Nick Connellan, Daniela Frangos, Michael Harry, Quincy Malesovas, Sasha Murray, Jo Rittey, Harvard Wang, and Irene Zhang.