Exhibition Street Restaurant Antara To Close – but a New Venue Is Already Slated for the Space

When the Halim Group (The Hotel Windsor, Aru, Saadi) opened Antara in 2023, the team modelled it on the grand all-day cafes of Europe, or “another part of the planet,” as group director Adipoetra Halim puts it.

“We thought that that model could work in the city,” he says. But the group just announced that the hybrid bakery, restaurant and wine bar on Exhibition Street will close after service on Saturday May 30. “It requires a lot more volume and foot traffic and a more dynamic environment, and at the moment, that’s not there.”

This spring, the group will replace Antara with “a different concept that is more focused on dining rather than having multiple concepts co-exist within the same space,” according to Halim.

Head chef Juan Lantadilla Tapia, who was head chef at Cutler before taking over at Antara at the start of 2025, will remain with the group. And Halim teases Antara’s bakery will “take a different form elsewhere” in a scaled-up form, removed from the larger dining room.

While Antara opened in 2023, the group first conceived the space in late 2019. “[Antara] was designed for Melbourne back then,” Halim says. And though the restaurateur thinks a similar all-day space could work in the future, he says the venue was “designed for a city that has a different dynamic … that dynamic’s no longer there.” 

Antara will close after service on Saturday May 30, 2026.