All the New Restaurants, Bars and Cafes We Got Excited About in Autumn 2026

Summer was sweaty and busy and we welcomed nine new venues to the local scene. Autumn kept things at a simmer with seven new restaurants, including a regional diner worth a road trip, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pop-up, and a Greek taverna-inspired spot – as well as two new hotels.

Bair Bones, Margaret River

Laura and Tim Hardy open restaurants worth travelling for. In 2020, the pair opened Van Bone, an adored 16-seat restaurant in the isolated Tasmanian coastal town of Marion Bay, which quickly earnt a reputation as one of the state’s best regional restaurants before closing in December 2024. Last year, the couple packed up and made the move from Tassie to Margaret River, where Tim started working with winemaker Robert Gherardi of Mr Barval Fine Wines while Laura built a vegetable garden on the property.

Now the pair have opened Bair Bones, a pop-up dining series running twice a month (on Friday and Saturday evenings) throughout winter. It’s 10 courses and serves just 14 guests per service. The menu is thoughtful and firmly produce-led. Bitter garden leaves topped with shaved cured egg yolk and honey from the property are served alongside a soulful, hazy, effervescent house wine. Marron is served over smoking pine on hand-whittled skewers, while truffle escargot pastries are built to be dunked into liquid Cambray farmhouse gold cheese.

Currently, the plan is to run the pop-up until September 2026, but what the Hardys will do next is still up in the air.

Bakmi Kochan 88, Myaree

In March, Chandra Harsono, Sheila Handijatno and Eveline Indra opened Bakmi Kochan 88, with the aim of bringing lively Jakartan breakfasts to Myaree. The essential order is bakmi, a wheat noodle that’s springy enough to hold your choice of toppings, from minced pork to barbeque pork and poached chicken. All noodles are served with a side of chicken broth, adding a homey warmth to the end of your meal. The version at Bakmi Kochan reflects familiar flavours from the trio’s childhood – a Chinese Indonesian bakmi with a base that’s less sweet and more savoury, with a notable emphasis on pork toppings like crispy pork lard and minced pork.

Like any good breakfast place, there’s plenty of room for sides like baso ikan (fish balls), baso sapi (beef balls), hekeng (a pork and prawn sausage wrapped in tofu sheets that crisp up like edible cellophane when fried), and wontons.

Bakmi Kochan is creating a breakfast routine that brings Jakarta and Perth closer, one bowl at a time.

Bistro Massilia, Inglewood

Bistro Massilia is a Euro-style neighbourhood bistro bringing the wide-ranging French and Mediterranean influences of Marseilles dining to Beaufort Street. The menu is a celebration and the fun starts at the top, with a dessert masquerading as a savoury starter: an eclair of light choux pastry filled with duck parfait and topped with spiced plum and Sichuan peppercorns. The coquillettes jambon is a kind of French mac’n’cheese, with more-ish comté-laden elbow pasta. The steak is a confit Black Angus oyster blade – an affordable cut that gets premium treatment, slow-cooked overnight.

The real show-stopper is the cheeseburger: cut in half, skewered and served in an ocean of bearnaise sauce. Like the rest of the menu, it’s designed for sharing and is best paired with fries to soak up the sauce.

Cafe Music, Fremantle

Good news! Fremantle scored a charming new music bar. Bad news! It’s closing after two weeks. Cafe Music, the pop-up from Wines of While founders Tom Van Beem and Emma Pegrum, took over the former Prestige Italian Cafe on Phillimore Street for the duration of Arrival Festival.

There are no elaborate cocktails, there’s no kitchen pumping out small plates, and no fanfare. Just records, drinks, a few snacks and a room full of people settling in for the evening. Cafe Music looks deliberately improvised. Marketplace finds sit alongside repurposed furniture from the former cafe. White tablecloths cover almost everything. It’s a little theatrical, a little European and entirely unconcerned with perfection.

The drinks list follows a similar philosophy. Mini Martinis arrive in tiny glasses. Negronis, Campari sodas, vermouth and soda, G&Ts and Swan Draught keep things uncomplicated. Wines rotate from Van Beem's distribution portfolio. Snacks are limited to olives and crisps.

The real attraction is the music – a rotating cast of local DJs – across eight days. The pop-up runs until June 6, after which the future of the space remains deliberately open-ended. If Fremantle takes to the concept, Pegrum says Cafe Music may return in some form.

Farra, Perth

Aaron Moore (ex-head chef at Bread in Common and Coogee Common) grew up in Ireland but moved to Greece at the age of 17, where he first learnt to cook by working his way around various tavernas in the Greek Islands. Farra is a modern take on the ethos Moore adopted at these tavernas. The restaurant occupies three separate-yet-connected spaces within the hotel: a dining room, the pool deck and a terrace.

There’s breakfast (think eggs Benedict with Aegean hollandaise) and meze for lunch and a dinner menu which flows from snacky options like tomato keftedes, rabbit meatballs, and mizithra dumplings folded with zucchini blossom and basil to larger plates like goat sheftalia, or saltbush lamb cutlets.

Gwelup Fish & Chips, Gwelup

Not all hospo hopefuls dream of white tablecloths. For Anisha Halik, one half of the team behind bowls club phenomenon Special Delivery and the fire-fuelled Magnolia BBQ, the dream never strayed far from the takeaway counter.

“I’ve always wanted a fish and chip shop,” Halik says. “That was kind of my end goal. Just work from four to eight and call it a day.”

Enter Gwelup Fish & Chips, a classic neighbourhood fish’n’chipper on North Beach Road, open just four hours a night and already drawing a loyal following.

The menu is reassuringly familiar: a mix of local and imported fish served battered, crumbed, or grilled; an array of salty seafood snacks including crab sticks, squid rings, and sea scallops; fish burgers and tacos; a kids’ menu; and weekly specials such as barbequed bluefin tuna with sesame sambal tumis.

What sets Gwelup Fish & Chips apart from your standard fish’n’chipper is the talent – Halik and her husband Jacob D’Vauz. They elevate the classics with fryers run on beef tallow, seasoning from premium Australian-owned Pep, and a fridge stocked with Aussie-made Bobby sodas and non-alcoholic beers.

Masa Mesa, Nedlands

Masa Mesa is a deeply personal project for chef Erick Martinez and his wife Lara Martinez. The menu draws equally from his Salvadoran heritage and her Argentinian roots, while also folding in flavours they’ve encountered travelling through Latin America.

The star of the show is the pupusa – a dish that, in El Salvador, carries the weight of national pride. At Masa Mesa, the thick masa tortillas are stuffed with pork (cooked in its own fat, rillette-style), black beans and a trio of cheeses, then pressed flat and grilled until the filling melts. They arrive at the table topped with curtido, a sharp cabbage slaw that cuts through the richness.

Then there’s choripan, the Argentinian street classic: grilled chorizo with molten provoleta and chimichurri on bread. Baked Argentinian empanadas take a more indulgent route, filled with short-rib asado and cheese before being brushed with a bright green chimichurri.

Plus, two new hotels:

• Hyde Hotel, Perth: The 121-room Hyde Hotel on Pier Street is the second Australian offering from the global lifestyle brand with locations in fashionable hubs across the globe. The interior was inspired by WA’s enviable sunsets. All rooms and suites come with Bose speakers, Chromecast and Lavazza coffee machines, while bathrooms are fitted with rainfall showers and are stocked with Bumble and Bumble hair products. It’s also home to Aaron Moore’s Farra.

• Owston Hotel, Fremantle: Owston takes its cues from the Italian locanda, a small neighbourhood hotel where the hospitality extends well beyond the front desk and into the surrounding streets. Here, that means guests are welcomed with a drink at Ode to Sirens, breakfast comes courtesy of Common Bakery downstairs, and priority bookings at Vin Populi are folded into the experience. The rooms feel deeply connected to Fremantle, retaining their heritage feel without going too heavy with nostalgia. The Owston works best as a base from which to launch yourself into Fremantle’s orbit and the buzz from the street at night reinforces the fact that you’re not sealed inside a hotel; rather, you’re staying in the heart of one of Perth’s buzziest neighbourhoods.

Additional reporting by Bonita May Grima, Cydnal Petty, Jessica Rigg, Madeline Wallman and Ange Yang.