Ten to Try: Brunswick’s Best New Restaurants, Bakeries and More

It’s a good time to live in Brunswick. These exciting openings – including two scroll shops, three bakeries, a Japanese wine bar and a family-style Greek restaurant – have all landed between Brunswick East and West since mid-year, proving the area is still at the city’s cultural heart, even as the scales tip from shabby to chic. Vandels co-founder Veronica Fil sums up the mood: “Brunswick just feels right. It’s eclectic, it’s relaxed. People are a bit weird, so are we.” Amen to that.

See our full guide to Brunswick, with 80 venues, for even more options.

Itera

The couple behind Kudo, the tiny gluten-free baker at the Windsor Hotel, has launched a full-sized bakery-cafe in the old Hard Yakka factory. Find leatherwood honey cakes; sourdough loaves; and canelé flavours including vanilla and oaked rum, pandan and taro, and jasmine tea with peach ganache and raspberry. Ex-Society sous-chef Kelvin Ong is behind a playful, East Asian-influenced dine-in menu featuring congee pot pies and tiger prawn burgers, and a retail offering specialises in gluten-free pantry staples. 4A Ballarat Street, Brunswick.

Better Now

Meanwhile, another baker brings a much-needed dietary offering to the suburb’s east. Better Now is the first permanent shop for Le Cordon Bleu-trained pastry chef Jai Johns, who became the Great Australian Bake Off’s first-ever vegan contestant in 2025. Their plant-based inventions run savoury and sweet, with Big Mac scones, za’atar scrolls, chilli-laced potato focaccia and Persian love cake with rosewater glaze and crushed pistachios. Laminated goods, like the miso-caramel apple turnovers, use a painstakingly developed puff pastry that you might recognise from TV. 130 Lygon Street, Brunswick East.

Scroll Lab

Chef Daniel Shrimpton moved from Ballarat to Brunswick West to find a permanent shop for his beloved pop-up, and he says it’s “the happiest that I’ve been in a long time”. His gloriously squishy, gooey scrolls are made with a “finicky” panettone starter and topped with malt and Sri Lankan cinnamon, matcha and raspberries, and of course cream-cheese frosting and vanilla bean glaze. There are also Thai-inspired numbers drawing on his time working at the famous Som Saa in London. 6 Grantham Street, Brunswick West

Tenko Sake and Wine Bar

With his intimate new bar and bottle shop on Lygon, sommelier Nicholas Oliveiro wants to make unfamiliar bottles feel approachable – and affordable. An adventurous saké menu is arranged in chapters (“Shiga Baby!”, “Easy Breezy”), with space carved out for koshu (aged saké), umeshu and yuzushu, and a flight celebrating female brewers, while wines include lesser seen Greek and Istrian varietals. Oliveiro whips up creative plates behind the bar, such as udon carbonara and Welsh rarebit with yuzu koshu. 472 Lygon Street, Brunswick East.

Brunswick Eats

Hospo veteran and Brunswick local Zoe Pearce has opened a place of her own in the former Milkwood site. The homey space has been redone in a style the ex-Beatrix baker calls “granny chic”, with colours of lime green, peach and pink, and a vintage cake cabinet filled with chunky cookies, lemon tarts, vegan scrolls and bomboloni with banana milk custard. Brunch is the main event, and includes scorched corn, manchego and jalapeno croquettes, and an eggs Benedict bun with a smoky marinated bacon slab. Don’t skip the vanilla slice, an old specialty added to the line-up by popular demand. 120 Nicholson Street, Brunswick East.

Vandels

This bakery by Shaun Quade – the founding chef at South Melbourne fine diner Lume – and his partner, Veronica Fil, has been going gangbusters since opening in late June. The cheffy line-up leans heavily on local produce, including the cultured butter from Lard Ass that goes into every pastry. The bee sting croissants are an early favourite, and savoury numbers like pork-and-fennel sausage rolls and pepper-beef-and-gruyere pies come with free house tomato sauce – Fil deems it “un-Australian” to charge for sauce. 446 Sydney Road, Brunswick.

Drop Shop

The curation is “ruthless” at this svelte bottle-o by Wine Victoria chair and Pinot Palooza founder Dan Sims. Modelled on Japanese konbini, Drop Shop aims to have you in and out with the right bottle of wine in next to no time. The tight, mostly Victorian selection is organised by occasion rather than region and varietal, and is laid out in three categories: weekday for those priced $15 to $25, party for ones that go for $25 to $40, and fancy for everything $40 and beyond. “You can walk into Drop Shop and, within 30 seconds, you could find what sort of style of wine you want within your price point and get out,” Sims says. 70 Lygon Street, Brunswick East.

Simply Mike’s

Albion’s loss was Brunswick’s gain when French born and trained baker Mike Ying renamed his bakery, previously called Cinnabuns, and moved it to Sydney Road. His team finishes up to 600 scrolls a day, after a four-day process involving yudane, a Japanese technique where flour is mixed with boiling water to increase moisture and softness. Flavours include cinnamon, coffee, Biscoff, pistachio, carrot cake and Vegemite topped with Grana Padano. 871 Sydney Road, Brunswick.

Roll Bae

Not far away, at the corner of Moreland Road and Holmes Street, content creator Kristine Subagiyo has swapped making videos about food for simply making food. At Roll Bae, her team bakes eight to nine flavours a day, including apple crumble; Vegemite and three cheeses; a Kinder Bueno, featuring melted chocolate and a whole Kinder Bueno on top; and a zesty lemon number drizzled with curd. 99 Holmes Street, Brunswick.

Patris

As you sink into a lounge chair next to the overflowing bookshelf at Patris, it feels like settling in for dinner at a friend’s house – and there’s a menu to match. The substantial meze line-up spans grilled halloumi with poached figs and eliopita, a Cypriot spiral bread threaded with olives, onion, parsley and mint, while mains include charcoal-grilled whole baby snapper and slow-cooked lamb shoulder with pomegranate glaze and zhug. 140 Barkly Street, Brunswick.

With reporting from Aastha Agrawal, Chelsea Chan, Nick Connellan, Nomi Makin, Quincy Malesovas, Audrey Payne and Haymun Win.