5 hottest Melbourne restaurants serving up global flavours

Walk a couple of blocks in the centre of Melbourne and you’ll easily encounter half a dozen cuisines hailing from various corners of the globe. The city is one of the most multicultural in Australia; more than half of Victorians are either born overseas or have at least one parent born abroad.

From fresh takes on Vietnamese bánh mì to crispy Greek-style fried fish just like how yiayia (Greek for “grandma”) made it, Melbourne’s diverse culinary offerings are the real thing, made by people who grew up eating it.

Compared to cities like London that have a much larger Nigerian diaspora, Melbourne’s Nigerian community is relatively small and most eateries serving the community are in the suburbs.

That’s changing with restaurants like Mary’s, which are making Nigerian flavours more visible to a bigger audience in a very Melburnian way: brunch by day, wine bar by night.

On the breakfast menu, you’ll find plantain bread with honey whipped cream and avocado toast with ata din din (a sauce made from tomato and red capsicum). And lunchtime means smoky jollof rice and a juicy Lagos chicken sandwich.

The flavours deepen for dinner – suya beef salad and seafood egusi (a stew with a rich nutty sauce made from melon seeds).

With dishes like yukhoe (Korean-style beef tartare) served with desert lime and dry-aged duck with a jocheong (Korean rice syrup) glaze, Doju exemplifies a form of Asian-Australian fusion that’s taken off all over Melbourne.

But not all restaurants pull it off as successfully as chef Mika Chae, who artfully combines his Korean heritage with a keen eye for Indigenous Australian ingredients and modern cooking techniques. The result is a fine dining experience that delights without over complicating the palate.

This cult favourite tofu shop in Brunswick never meant to become a viral snack shop – owner Sava Goto, who hails from Hyogo prefecture, Japan, was merely looking for a way to make use of the scraps left behind from making tofu.

Yet the resulting tofu donuts – yummy little pillows with a crispy, sugary crust dusted with your choice of black sesame powder or kinako – inspire lines down the block. In a city where Japanese cuisine is often limited to ramen or sushi, Tofu Shoten’s fresh takes on tofu-based snacks – including cakes, sando biscuits and douhua (pudding) – surprise with what this humble ingredient can do.

Located in a shiny new, mixed-use block in Brunswick East, Rumi’s slightly impersonal surroundings might make you question its authenticity, but the restaurant is the real deal.

When couple Joseph and Nat Abboud opened the first Rumi on Lygon Street in 2006, it broke away from the family-style eateries established by Melbourne’s vibrant Lebanese community, many of whom settled in Australia during the Lebanese Civil War in the ’70s and ’80s.

Twenty years on, its greatest hits – the Persian meatballs, sigara böreği (cheese cigars), quail skewers and lamb shoulder – are still scene-stealers.

Filipino cuisine flies under the radar compared to its Vietnamese and Thai neighbours, but Serai has firmly planted a stake in the culinary ground for Australia’s fifth-largest immigrant community.

Chef-owner Ross Magnaye offers a confident, irreverent update on Filipino favourites: wood-fired pig’s head sisig tacos, tosilog-style garlic claypot rice with smoked pork tocino (sweet-cured meat) and duck yolk, and the “McScallop”, a single, fried scallop doused in crab fat sauce and served in a pandesal bread roll.

It may seem gimmicky but the expert cooking and nuanced flavours make it worth your bite.