Eat your art out: Melbourne’s top gallery restaurants

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Melbourne

Enhancing a museum or art gallery with a quality dining venue is a trend that has steadily spread among major cities, with institutions such as Paris’s Palais de Tokyo art complex leading the way in “pairing” high art with top food. Melbourne is no different; its world-class galleries are increasingly accompanied by excellent eateries.

“If you have only a certain amount of time in the city, and you know that one gallery has a top food offering, you are much more likely to go there,” says Tony Ellwood, director of the National Gallery of Victoria. The museum, which boasts several places to eat from fine dining to cafés, is an example of how seriously Melbourne art institutions are about feeding both mind and body. In other galleries across the city, themed dinners are surrounded by multimedia installations, in-house vegetable gardens provide fresh inspiration and one restaurant even doubles up as an art space. 

Garden Restaurant at National Gallery of Victoria

180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, VIC 3006

Behind the huge wall of water cascading down the front windows of the NGV is one of Australia’s most-visited art collections. Tucked away further inside, however, the Garden Restaurant is still something of a secret, known largely to well-informed locals seeking a restful sanctuary right in the heart of the city. The light, large-windowed dining room looks on to a quiet garden and sculpture park, away from the nearby gallery crowds and the busy traffic of St Kilda Road.   

For the NGV’s Yayoi Kusama exhibition, chef Martin Benn created dishes such as roast miso toothfish, fermented white asparagus, caviar and sakura leaf © Eugene HylandThe Garden’s guest chefs match its menus to the NGV’s headline shows in winter and summer © Eugene Hyland

Since 2017, the restaurant has often tied its cuisine to headline exhibitions, hosting well-known chefs and themed menus: an upmarket dumpling bar for a display of the Terracotta Warriors; Spanish fare during a Picasso exhibition; and a north African-Mediterranean theme for 2024’s Pharaoh, shown in conjunction with the British Museum. For the summer of 2024-25, the noted Australian chef Martin Benn produced an Asian-themed menu to mark an exhibition dedicated to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

British-trained head chef Richard Hobdell, who has worked in high-profile venues ranging from Windsor Castle to fine-dining restaurants, hopes to see more people coming specifically for the Garden Restaurant. For now, it offers lunch year round and dinner on Fridays during the NGV’s winter and summer exhibitions. The accent is on local produce with a Mediterranean emphasis in dishes such as grilled halloumi with apricot, lamb kofta with cauliflower purée and caponata, 24-hour braised beef cheek in a smoked-pepper romesco sauce, and fish of the day with coconut, dried mango and cumin-spiced potato. The wine list is heavy on Australian labels, such as Yering Station in nearby Yarra Valley, and there are beers from Victoria’s inner-city craft brewery Stomping Ground.

The Lume

Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Convention Centre Place, South Wharf, Melbourne, VIC 3006

Launched in November 2021, The Lume bills itself as “the world’s largest digital-art gallery”. What that means is an immersive experience surrounding viewers with projections on the walls and ceiling of a vast space in the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, while side galleries are lined with artefacts and displays supporting the storytelling. The 2024 exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci, for example, featured recreations of machines he invented, an artist studio, a detailed exhibit about the “Mona Lisa” and Australia’s first display of original drawings and writings from the master’s own notebook, the Codex Atlanticus.

Café Terrace 1888 at The Lume’s current Vincent van Gogh exhibition © Peter Foster

The culinary strand of the experience also reflects the exhibitions, which include a pop-up restaurant whose name and menu are based on each show. Café Terrace 1888 that accompanies the current Vincent van Gogh exhibition was inspired by the French eatery in his painting “Café Terrace at Night”, while Leonardo was backed by Caffè Medici, serving Florentine dishes. 

The latter also hosted a special Saturday-night three-course set menu, “Feast for the Senses”, served beside a projection of “The Last Supper”, the same size as the original in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. On my visit, our sitting was limited to 25 people, allowing super-attentive service. We began with an eyebrow-raising sweet-and-sour white peach and ginger Bellini spritz. My vegetarian companion was delighted with an aubergine-based Sicilian caponata, followed by a Tuscan main of roasted portobello mushrooms. I had cured kingfish and a hearty, flavour-packed braised beef cheek with polenta. The wines — two reds, two whites and one rosé — were all from Victorian vineyards owned by De Bortoli. Between us, we were happy to sample them all, while listening to a 50-minute recorded narration about Leonardo’s life that also included music and projected images.

TarraWarra Museum of Art

313 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Wurundjeri Country, Healesville, VIC 3777

TarraWarra Museum of Art is about an hour north of central Melbourne

The Yarra Valley, an hour’s drive north of Melbourne city centre, is known for its country views, wine tastings, excellent art galleries and upmarket restaurants. You can find all four at the hilltop TarraWarra Estate in Yarra Glen, near to the town of Healesville, where vineyards surround the TarraWarra Museum of Art and one of the region’s most ambitious restaurants. 

The complex was created by the late fashion and retail entrepreneur Marc Besen and his wife Eva, who set up Australia’s first privately funded public art gallery, focusing on the country’s modern and contemporary art. As well as a permanent collection, a programme of temporary exhibits errs towards indigenous art and climate issues. It’s also hosted the prestigious Archibald Prize three times.

Dessert at the TarraWarra Museum of Art’s restaurant . . .  © Hugh Davison. . . which is one of the most ambitious eateries in the region © Rick Liston

The 60-seat restaurant offers fine dining, based on locally grown, seasonal produce, and views over the vineyards and the broader countryside. I began with a delicate starter of enoki and shiitake mushrooms on a bed of polenta in chicken jus, and followed with southern Victorian lamb and pearl barley — a dish that ticked all my boxes by also being generously proportioned. A honey cake dressed in marigold flowers was as pretty as it was delicious.  

Most of the wines on offer are TarraWarra’s own. The winery specialises in Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, but I particularly enjoyed a dry, flavour-filled 2023 estate rosé and a 2022 Rousanne, offering notes of white peach, lemon and lime.

Heide Kitchen at Heide Museum of Modern Art

7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen, VIC 3105

The Sculpture Plaza at Heide Museum of Modern Art © John Gollings

Heide has long been a treat for anyone looking to dive into Australian art, and particularly the history of Australian Modernism, with its extensive collection of works by artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. Now, the museum has partnered with restaurant and café company The Mulberry Group, which has taken over Heide Kitchen. The menu is drawn largely from the herb and vegetable gardens that have always played a special role at the property — a former dairy farm bought by heiress Sunday Reed and her husband John Reed in 1934. 

The couple, who died in 1981, poured as much energy and passion into the two kitchen gardens as they did into their role of supporting, feeding and at times housing painters including Nolan, Tucker and John Perceval. The property was sold to the state government to create the current museum, which includes a sculpture park and 6.5 hectares of gardens. As well as espaliered fruit trees and graceful eucalyptuses, there’s a magnificent “scar tree” that has served as a gathering place for local Wurundjeri people for at least four centuries. 

Heide Kitchen’s slow-roasted lamb and garden salad © Samantha SchultzOne of the restaurant’s two kitchen gardens © John Gollings

Today, the gardens’ bounty is combined with that of The Mulberry Group’s own regenerative farm to provide fresh, super-local produce. Salads are a pillar of the menu. The Caesar is a crisp treat, while the courgette and asparagus salad comes with a sharp miso and horseradish dressing. Mains include grilled local fish and roasted lamb shoulder. I had the buttermilk chicken schnitzel with peppercorn sauce; it was hefty and moist, and lifted by a Heide garden salad.

Di Stasio Città

45 Spring Street, Melbourne, VIC 3004

A video installation projected on to a wall at Di Stasio Città

Celebrated Melbourne restaurateur and arts patron Rinaldo Di Stasio does not run dining establishments that are linked to art galleries; instead, he combines the two so that diners are surrounded by video installations, sculptures and paintings. 

His three restaurants are as well known for their design aesthetics and artistic settings as for their prestige Italian cuisine. Pizzeria Di Stasio Carlton features sculptures by Shaun Gladwell, a finalist in the 2024 Archibald Prize for portraiture, and bold paintings by indigenous artist Reko Rennie. Café Di Stasio, often ranked as Melbourne’s top Italian restaurant, is even preparing to…

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