Introducing Neighbourhood Favourites on The Hot List

The Hot List handed you the keys to the city when it launched in 2024. The one-page guide to Melbourne’s most essential eating and drinking experiences is regularly updated by Broadsheet’s editors based on internal search data, wider industry insights and our own dining experiences.

On The Hot List, you’ll find a crop of Melbourne’s most-talked about new openings, but also decades-old institutions that feel as relevant as ever. If a place is helping define how the city eats and drinks, we think it’s worth your time and we’ll add it to the Hot List.

As always, these inclusions are chosen independently. Broadsheet is not paid by the restaurants, cafes and bars we write about. What does or doesn’t reach The Hot List is solely up to us – no one can pay to get on.

Powerful filters have been part of the experience from the beginning. More than just a static list of recommendations, The Hot List is a place where you can quickly narrow down to a specific budget, favourite cuisine or suburb. Keen to check out one of those institutions still crushing it? The Icon filter is your friend. How about one of those fresh spots everyone is checking out? Hit the Newly Added button.

This year we’ve also introduced the Neighbourhood Favourite filter, to recognise all the small, mostly owner-operated restaurants that make their strip, block or whole damn suburb sing. You know the kind, where most patrons walk over, seemingly everyone is greeted by name and regulars might come three times a week.

We think there’s something special about that, and these places deserve your hard-earned as much as the big destinations in the CBD or the institutions people still cross town for. Some of the places we’ve tagged are excellent Mauritian wine bar Manzé, cute-as-a-button cafe Moon Mart and the perennially packed Albert’s, in Armadale. Check the full complement here.

In other news, we’ve fixed some pesky bugs and tweaked certain visual elements to make the list easier and more intuitive to use. We have so many more plans for The Hot List, but in the meantime, please do contact me with any feedback or ideas you may have at nick.connellan@broadsheet.com.au.