Australia’s Best New Restaurants of 2023 to Add to Your Hitlist

When your job involves eating out, you soon learn how to spot singular venues. They might be playing by entirely different rules to the others, doing the standards better than anywhere else, or simply bringing unmatched good times.

This year’s best restaurants are a grab-bag of those qualities – they might be serving Italian or French, dishes made with local produce or simply just really great cheeseburgers, but they’re all bringing something fresh to the Australian dining scene. Some might end up as institutions, others might burn bright then fade away. All have stuck out for once again upping the ante of dining out in Australia’s capital cities.

The list is in alphabetical order by capital city. Get stuck in.

ADELAIDE
La Louisiane, CBD

When the teams behind Nola and Shotgun Willies opened their moody, subterranean French restaurant in July, their first move was to tap French-born chef Alexis Besseau (former head chef behind the highly successful Sydney bistro Restaurant Hubert) to helm the restaurant. Besseau is focusing on classic brasserie dishes, from gruyere cheese soufflé to snails and crème brûlée. Dishes are served on old-school blue-rimmed plates heaped high with steak frites and pate en croute. Ruby-red steak tartare is served with “pommes gaufrette”, a haute-cuisine answer to waffle-cut chips. There’s a signature burger and fries (which dare we say might compete with Hubert’s cult cheeseburger). With deep booths, plush red-velvet seating and white tapers and tri-colour flags springing from empty bottles of French champagne, the former Wing It sports bar space is all but unrecognisable.

Longplay Bistro, CBD

The highly anticipated new bistro from the Clever Little Tailor team has been a long time coming. With a European bistro feel, a one-page menu that comfortably straddles daytime and evening services and a pair of former Summertown Aristologist chefs in the kitchen, this Pirie Street spot has all the markings of an institution in the making. Menu highlights include bootleg bucatini smothered in vodka sauce; King George whiting served with green sauce; and steaming mussels served in a creamy white wine sauce. The drinks list is a mixtape of global hits with an emphasis on the wines the team enjoys personally. In lieu of an AUX cord a vintage turntable sits on the 14-metre-long bar playing tunes through a custom Funktion-One sound system.

BRISBANE
Pilloni, West End

The sequel to Andrea Contin and Valentina Vigni’s Roman restaurant La Lupa, Pilloni is a Sardinian restaurant championing charcoal cooking. As well as regional pasta dishes – culurgiones filled with potato, pecorino and mint, and malloreddus (small, gnocchi-shaped shells) with lamb shoulder ragu and pecorino – the menu’s main drawcard is the porceddu, a quartered and spit-roasted suckling pig with ultra-crisp crackling. The wine list was put together under the guidance of former Essa sommelier Phil Poussart and includes rare Sardinian varietals like vermentino and the harder-to-find cannonau and granazza. The Alkot Studio and Tonic Projects fit-out was shortlisted for an Australian Interior Design Award.

Pneuma, CBD

Dan Arnold (Restaurant Dan Arnold and La Cache a Vin) and Matt Blackwell’s (ex- Goma Restaurant) Pneuma was one of the most hotly anticipated openings of the year. Taking over the former Greenglass space, Pneuma is confidently carving out its own niche without adhering to expectations from former customers. Arnold will continue to run his other two restaurants, but will cast a close eye over Pneuma, while Blackwell is running the pass. The menu includes snacks and small plates, such as smoked eel cream with black apple and crispy potato; malt tart with cheddar custard and Jerusalem artichoke; and corned ox tongue with tomato kasundi; plus mains like roasted monkfish tail with smoked onion and mussel beurre blanc. There are also two set menus priced at $85 and $115 respectively. The wine list draws heavily upon Australian and French wines and there’s a reserve list for anyone looking to splurge.

MELBOURNE
Julie, Abbotsford

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.

Reine and La Rue, CBD

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.

PERTH
Threecoins & Sons, Mount Lawley

Threecoins & Sons is a restaurant designed to comfort, rather than challenge, guests. Very little of the menu requires googling. Reservations are accepted – both online and via a real live human who will answer when you call the venue. None of this is groundbreaking, but in an era where casual food options and pop-ups seem to be taking over Perth’s dining landscape, it’s nice to be reminded of the pleasures of a traditional restaurant. Threecoins & Sons is what we’ve come to expect from the Trequattrini family, who also run Testun. The menu is a round-up of Italian favourites that should be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s ever eaten in a restaurant set with a gingham tablecloth. But familiarity doesn’t equate to staleness. House-made pastas (long and short eggless pastas, an egg pasta, a filled pasta, a ricotta gnocchi and more) cover plenty of ground. Vitello tonnato, burrata with caponata, and seafood fritto misto feature among the snacks. Steak, market fish and plates of lamb chops hot off the grill (called “scottadito”, Italian for “burned fingers”) make up the mains. Pinsa, a Roman flatbread, has replaced woodfired pizza, with six variants ranging from a margherita to a white-based Hawaiian riff that features mortadella and a pineapple salsa.

SYDNEY
Caterpillar Club, CBD

Is it a bar or is it a restaurant? In this case, we're letting it sneak onto the list. Sydney hospitality group Swillhouse’s portfolio reads like a greatest hits of your best nights out in the city, from The Baxter Inn to Restaurant Hubert and Frankie’s Pizza (RIP). And its latest venue – so new it only just made this wrap – is no different, an underground restaurant-meets-bar-meets-nightclub in a former strip club fuelled by a 10,000-strong record collection, large-scale Pina Coladas and a menu of food designed to be eaten between boogies. A big part of its charm is that food menu: it’s available from opening till the venue’s 4am close. Fancy one of the city’s best cheeseburgers with chips fried in beef fat at 3.30am? Here’s your place. You could also order the fish fingers with zingy tartare, a stack of tuna-melt triangles or oozy spinach-and-cheese hand pies. Round out the evening at hidden tiki bar, The Bamboo Room, out the back. Or take to the dance floor before sneaking one last round of oysters Kilpatrick in a slinky red-leather booth. Whatever experience you choose, our money is on The Caterpillar Club becoming your next fave.

Clam Bar, CBD

When Andy Tyson, Dan Pepperell and Mikey Clift announced they were opening a new New York-inspired steakhouse, we expected excellence. And when Clam Bar ’s glass doors swung open in May, that’s what we got. The ex- Bridge Room space copped an all-out revamp – think Murano glass chandeliers, antique sconces and parquet floors – with the same warmth as the trio’s other venues, Pellegrino 2000 and Bistrot 916. The menu features ’80s-leaning “daggy drinks” – including one served in the “classiest tiki glass you’ll ever see” – and a standout macaroni alla vodka laced with cheesy kimchi. Plus: a magnificent raw seafood bar, and a cheese and bacon burger that’ll have a lasting impact.