Victoria Food & Traditional Cuisine

Victoria eats better than its size suggests, and Melbourne is the reason. The city's food culture is built on postwar migration rather than a colonial inheritance: Italian and Greek first, then Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian and Ethiopian, each anchored in particular suburbs.

Coffee is the local obsession. Melbourne's café scene grew out of Italian espresso bars in the 1950s and the standard is now genuinely high — an indifferent cup is unusual rather than expected.

The produce behind it is cool-climate: Gippsland dairy, Mallee grain, Western District lamb and beef, and abalone and crayfish off the southwest coast.

Flat white, done properly

Melbourne's contribution to the world. Ordered by name, judged closely, and rarely bad.

Souvlaki

The late-night staple, from a Greek community that has been here for three generations. Oakleigh and the inner north do it best.

Banh mi and pho

Victoria Street in Richmond and the Footscray market are the centres. A banh mi under A$10 is one of the best-value meals in the country.

Gippsland cheese

Cool, wet green country makes genuinely good cheddar, blue and washed-rind cheeses, sold at farm gates and markets.

Abalone and crayfish

Both are fished off the southwest coast and are expensive for good reason. Portarlington mussels are the affordable alternative and excellent.

Dim sim

An oversized, locally evolved dumpling found nowhere else, sold steamed or deep-fried. Not the same thing as dim sum.

The Queen Victoria Market has traded since 1878 across several hectares — produce, deli halls and, on winter Wednesday evenings, a night market that locals actually use.

The Footscray and Springvale markets are where the city's Vietnamese and Cambodian communities shop, and the eating there is better and cheaper than anything in the centre.

Farmers' markets run across the inner suburbs on rotating weekends, and the regional ones — Daylesford, Red Hill, Bright — are worth planning a drive around.

Cellar doors in the Yarra and on the Mornington Peninsula mostly serve food now, and several are destinations in their own right.

Victoria has more wineries than any other state, and they are cool-climate almost throughout. The Yarra Valley, an hour from Melbourne, makes the state's best-known Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and some of Australia's finest sparkling wine by the traditional method.

The Mornington Peninsula is cooler still and Pinot-focused; the Grampians and Heathcote make structured Shiraz; and Rutherglen in the northeast makes fortified Muscat and Topaque of a quality with almost no international equivalent.

Much of this survived because Victoria's vineyards were replanted after phylloxera devastated them in the 1870s — the reason its wine history reads as newer than South Australia's.

Craft brewing and gin distilling are both strong in Melbourne and the regional towns.