2025 March 21 – April 30, 2025

And that, Australia, is a wrap on Melbourne Food & Wine Festival 2025 – and what a Festival it was. A massive shout out to our Principal Partner La Trobe Financial, to our Destination Partner Visit Victoria, and most importantly to you, our fearless eaters.

We kicked things off in rare style at Melbourne Place with a glittering opening night party, presented by OpenTable, that saw Melbourne’s culinary crème de la crème assemble in anticipation of 10 days of big flavours and thrilling collaborations.

We began dining in earnest the following morning with Melbourne’s own Curtis Stone, who took up the tongs for this year’s La Trobe Financial World’s Longest Lunch. A soft morning rain gave way to an afternoon of great eating at Kings Domain, where the man of the moment dressed 600 metres of beautifully appointed table with 1,600 tender beef cheeks. This year’s World’s Longest Brunch was literally a walk in the park – a Sunday stroll through the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne that called at three stops, each catered by the queen of abundance herself, Julia Busuttil Nishimura. Late-summer bruschetta, Persian herb frittata, and pistachio saffron cake in in the gardens? Yes please.

Unofficial MFWF mascot Richard Hart deserves an honorary citizenship after his wildly popular pop-up at Melbourne Quarter. The man behind Copenhagen’s Hart Bageri and Mexico City’s Green Rhino baked up a storm for five days straight, attracting baking fanatics by the hundreds – some setting up camping chairs before sunrise just to secure his famous city loaf, a cardamom bun, a pan de muerto and a glimpse of the man dubbed the world’s best baker.

Our Global Dining Series soared to new heights in 2025, courtesy of our partner Singapore Airlines, with residencies and collaborations of exceptional provenance stunning the city day and night. The mighty, meaty St John and Tomos Parry’s incredible Basque-accented Brat held it down for guests from Great Britain – so too London’s “inauthentic ramen” sensation Supa Ya. Tokyo’s Sézanne and Florilège brought Japanese focus and French flair in equal measure, while hit Kyoto diner Kichi Kichi brought something altogether new: a loud, proud omurice spectacular and a rich sensory feast.

If they were our Global Dining Series north stars, there were plenty more who shone just as bright in briefer stays. Vaughan Mabee, wild man of Central Otago, came armed with paua saucisson and fumé to match in a thrilling taste of his world-beating Amisfield restaurant. Ho Jiak impresario Junda Khoo teamed up with Flower Drum for a Malaysian-Cantonese feast that augured deliciously for the future of Melbourne Malaysian food. (Ho Jiak opens on Bourke Street later this year.) Rome-based cook and author Alice Adams Carosi joined the Very Good Falafel crew for an olive oil-rich celebration of Italian vegetables and Roman culture at the Princes Park bowlo, while Brico took a turn through Vietnam, inviting chef and author Anaïs Ca Dao van Manen to take the reins in Carlton North. That was just the beginning.

Our Special Events program, presented by Square, was among the biggest and broadest in recent memory, taking in everything from South Indian banana-leaf feasts on the banks of the Yarra in Warburton to all-out hootenannies in Gippsland hay sheds and cocktail parties with celebrity penguins. There were events dedicated to tattooing, to hat-making, to crime, to photography, to war, to comedy, to percussion, and much, much more.

In 2025, we proved that there was indeed such a thing as a free lunch. In fact, there were three, and they were attended by thousands. We kicked off with Something Saucy, headlined by the pasta punks of Super Norma, who sent the CBD into an al forno frenzy slinging a thousand serves of free sedanini alla Norma from Whitehart, thanks to Leggo’s.

From there it was off to Wesley Place, where city treasures Tom Sarafian and Raph Rashid celebrated the great cross-cultural miracle of Mexican-Middle Eastern food by giving away hundreds of tacos de canasta with prawn, potato, toum and salsa verde, and goat kibbeh with Oaxacan cheese, labne and sumac.

We also celebrated the 80-plus years of the dim sim – a Melbourne-born icon – with the help of three of our city’s most dynamic young chefs at Dim City. There were dim sims flavoured with chicken, lamb, green chilli and coriander by Rosheen Kaul; there were dim sims stuffed with kimchi and topped with cheese sauce by Eun Hee An; there were dim sims injected with banana cake and dunked in caramel sauce by John Rivera. They were incredible, and we gave away a thousand of them to excited dimmie fans – including none other than Elizabeth Chong, the 92-year-old doyenne of Chinese food in Australia and daughter of the dim sim’s inventor.

All roads would then lead us to Fed Square, with thanks to City of Melbourne, for the third coming of Australia’s greatest celebration of caking and baking, Baker’s Dozen. We came, we queued, and we delighted in the most extraordinary line-up of baked goods this country has ever seen – All Are Welcome’s khachapuri egg boat pastry, Monforte Viennoiserie’s salted hojicha kouign-amann, To Be Frank’s carbonara twist, Lumos’s kimchi croissant and Raya’s ube banana pie among them, plus extra-huge excitement for team-ups from Iris and Sydney’s A.P Bakery and one last hurrah from Richard Hart with Baker Bleu.

Thank you to everyone who came, who ate and who delighted in any way shape or form in this year’s Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. Thank you to the chefs, the staff, and to everyone everywhere who had a hand in bringing the dream to life for another year, and thank you to our partners for seeing the vision. We’ll see you next year – we’re hungry already.

By Frank Sweet