Hot List Update: Three Newly Added Restaurants – and a Great Bakery – To Try in December

The Hot List is the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences, updated weekly. 

December already? How on earth did 2025 happen so quickly? And if you’re anything like me, there are still so many places you wanted to try this year that you haven’t gotten to yet. Finances, stomach space and the inevitable passage of time are tough foes to overcome. 

Thankfully, if you need to prioritise where to get to in the last gasps of the year, The Hot List can help. In the last few weeks, we’ve added a bunch of the most essential new openings in town. And if you can’t get to them by the end of the year, the silver lining is that you’ll have an easy – and delicious – new year’s resolution already locked in and ready to go for 2026. 

El Columpio, St Kilda 

Last month El Columpio, the beloved Fitzroy Mexican restaurant, opened its second location in St Kilda. It would have been very easy for Ricardo Garcia Flores to take everything that worked about the Fitzroy original, and just transpose it into a new spot in St Kilda. After all – tacos? The beach? What could go wrong? But Garcia Flores doesn’t usually do things the easy way. (Just ask his lard, which he says he’s been continuously cooking for 18 months.) And we’re all the better because of it. Now, fans of the old El Columpio will find plenty of exciting new things to try – like marisco seafood towers and fish burritos – while St Kilda newcomers also get to discover the joys of a few old favourites that have made it over, like the beef suadero tacos. And it’s right by the beach, and right in time for summer. 

The Carpenter’s Ruin, St Kilda 

Something must be in the water over in St Kilda, because the new openings have been coming in thick and fast. A 15-minute walk away from El Columpio, over on Inkerman Street, you’ll find The Carpenter’s Ruin. It’s a new pub in an old space. Back in the day it was local institution Mr Wolf, before it shut down and split into two tenancies. One eventually became wine bar The Walrus, while the other, larger half continued as a pizzeria. When that pizzeria shut, The Walrus’s owners couldn’t resist the chance to reunite the two long-lost rooms. The decor is warm and breezy, and the vibe is relaxed – but don’t be fooled. One look at the drinks list, and one taste of whatever dish you order, will tell you that this team is taking the art of being casual very seriously. 

Butter Days, Malvern 

The hospitality industry is notoriously tough, and it doesn’t come with a lot of guarantees. But if the success of Tarts Anon and now Butter Days can teach us anything, it’s that if you win Dessert Masters, then open a pastry shop, you’ll have a very good chance of doing well. When John Demetrios, winner of the most recent season of the baking-focused show, took home the title, he ploughed his money back into Butter Days. 

It paid off. On day one the Scandi-inspired bakery – whose goods include sunshine buns, brown butter biscuits and more croissants than you could shake a baguette at – sold out in 45 minutes. And they’ve continued to sell out – often well before their official closing time. But sun buns are worth waiting for, particularly when they’re made by a dessert master like Demetrios. 

Yiaga, East Melbourne 

If you’re a regular Broadsheet reader you may have noticed that we’ve been talking quite a bit about Yiaga this year – both in the lead-up to its October launch, and in the weeks since. And if you’ve yet to have the pleasure of dining there, you may even think that we’ve been carrying on about it a little bit too much. Well, if anything, we aren’t banging on about it nearly enough. Because Yiaga really is that special and it really does deliver, somehow, on the hype. With Yiaga, chef Hugh Allen has opened a celebration of Melbourne, Victoria and Australia. And it’s exhilarating to think that this is just the beginning of what will hopefully be a long story. 

The Hot List is proudly sponsored by Square.