The eating and drinking options are just too numerous and too wonderful to enumerate.
Just around the Hoddle Street corner, 260 m away, there’s an unassuming Italian restaurant, Cucina Vostra, which is very handy for take away when you can’t wait for delivery. I bet you’ve never noticed it.
You can walk to some of Melbourne’s most gorgeous picnic spots as you will appreciate if you’ve already read that part of this website. Uber Eats will deliver food from a trillion local and not so local restaurants for $5, and the other delivery services will too.
Some of Melbourne’s best restaurants are a walk away (Indeed, you can walk to Carlton for dinner — think Gerald’s Bar, and Epocha, 2.5 km away (30 minute walk) — but that’s not what I meant.)
More likely walks to some of Melbourne’s hottest eating places are to Andrew McConnell’s Cutler + Co, and its associated next-door wine bar Marion on Gertrude Street, Saint Crispin on Smith Street, the wonderful Mexican Hotel Jesus, Madras Brothers and Andrew McConnell’s new Hongkonese venture at the Builder’s Arms Hotel, Ricky & Pinky.
There’s a glorious Victorian pub in the Carringbush Hotel on one corner of Raphael street, and a cafe with great homemade food across the road on the corner of Gipps Street, Red Bird Cafe.
Still super-local in terms of cafes within a couple of hundred metres, there’s the very chi-chi one at the extraordinary furniture and homewares emporium of Weylandts, Mavis the Grocer, Au79 (the latest hottest thing: a massive enterprise), Three Bags Full (the hottest thing a year or two ago and still undoubtedly one of Melbourne’s best cafes), the very lovely Streat (‘Tasted Good, Does Good’), and Coffee Peddlr just beyond the Carringbush. (You can get best quality fresh baked bread from Au79, Streat, Three Bags Full and the Convent Bakery; where else in Melbourne could you say that?)
I like a cafe where you can sit outside, untroubled by motor vehicles, a rarity in Melbourne. In Abbotsford, you are spoilt for choice: the Children’s Farm’s and Convent’s cafes, a swag of cafes by the river in the new developments opposite Ikea which you can walk to (e.g. Four Larks), the Studley Park Boathouse a lovely walk away, and the Fairfield Boat House (a pleasant cycle on the bikepath). Another little out of the way backstreet gem with a beautiful garden to sit in is 8 Murray Street, near the CUB brewery. Down in that area between Victoria Street and the Yarra near the brewery is a hub of Melbourne’s coffee industry. Super-tucked away is Coffee Supreme, a place for people serious about their coffee.
Between Hoddle Street and Smith Street there is a panoply of great, backstreet cafes: South of Johnston, great on a winter’s morning on account of its roaring fire, and Proud Mary. Then there are the Moon and Comptoir (a bottleshop and winebar started by Rockpool veterans, so you don’t have to walk the extra 100m to Blackhearts & Sparrows). There are great Japanese places all over, including the darling Cibi. Perhaps most astonishing, should you stumble upon them of an evening as I have in both cases on little walks, is Rupert on Rupert, and Project 49.
Somewhere like Richmond Hill Café & Larder with its wondrous cheese room on Bridge Road is just 1.6 km south, a 15 minute walk and I used to walk down and get some cheese regularly. Indeed, the Corner Hotel on Swan Street is only 2.5 km away.
I like a period pub without pokies and a proper front bar, to go out for meals with the kids, or meet up with local friends. I am pretty sure that nowhere else in Melbourne will you find as many fantastic pubs within a 1 km walk.
My favourite Melbourne pub is 150m down the road on the next corner in Raphael St: the historic Carringbush Hotel. It has always had a great restaurant (back in its Good Food Guide days the publican used to quip laconically that his chef was always trying to get pickled larks’ tongues onto the menu), a brilliant pub food family eating area (they do half parmas for $12), a beer garden, many open fires and a fully functioning perfectly traditional front bar frequented by eclectic people: high vis workmen, hospitality types, journalists, professionals. It has a meeting room / private dining room. Damn it, until a few months ago, it had a swag of calssic old cogers resident in the rooms upstairs: old school.
It’s perfect in every way: you’ll eat there very often. Squizzy Taylor, John Wren, and generations of Collingwood footballers and fans frequented it. Even the late Chopper Read liked a quiet drink there for a while once he was behaving himself. It was bought recently by a restauranteur and word is the restaurant’s going to be something really special again soon while the rest of the place will be preserved. It has a bottle shop, which is handy, and they look after locals (with a 10% discount for a while!).
Equally good now though is Stomping Ground, an old factory turned into a sublime craft brewery and enormous indoor-outdoor beer hall and restaurant, 350 m away. Just up Gipps St from there is the unique and fantastic New Orleans pub and absinthe bar, Le Bon Ton. That’s 550 m away. Six hundred metres away is the wonderful Park Hotel: good value food and a great beer garden, truly an honest old-style pub (with new-style attitudes).
‘The Sullivans’ was filmed in the also-unique Retreat Hotel opposite, where there is a great long-standing Sunday afternoon jazz gig and great food. And a few minutes’ walk to Johnston Street takes you to the enormous Yarra Hotel with its live music scene, Dr Morse and the Lulie St Tavern (soon to serve Rita’s pizzas through a hole in the adjoining walls).
Other favourite pubs are The Union Club (1.0 km), which is close to The Napier, and The Labor in Vain. And how I managed to leave Smith Street’s 1854 bluestone Grace Darling to last, I do not know.
Or Smith Street’s the Robbie Burns (more Spanish than its name suggests) for that matter. Or Smith St’s amazing Craft + Co: another brewery and distillery and cheesery with great food.
Oh, and then there’s Victoria St’s pubs: The National (where dogs are welcomed in the beer garden), the Terminus, the Aviary with its beautiful beer garden and very un-Asian food in the heart of the South-East Asian precinct (see also the much overlooked and in fact absolutely top class Victoria Street pizzeria Elounge), and the Vic.
In fact, pizza should get its own paragraph. In addition to Elounge, There’s a cheap pizza shop 200 m away on Hoddle Street occasionally useful in an emergency. We zip up to Ladro on Gertrude Street for takeaway and eat-ins. It’s Melbourne’s best, after 400 Gradi. The aforementioned Rita’s is also great, and so are the Convent Bakery’s pizza (beautiful eaten on the Convent’s stunning lawns), Lazerpig, and Cavallini’s sister enterprise, Queen Margaret (Clifton Hill’s restaurants are a 5 minute drive up Hoddle Street).