EAT > YIAGA, Melbourne (20/20)

Share This Article

Tucked inside the historic Fitzroy Gardens, in a pavilion that has served refreshments to Melburnians since 1908, Yiaga is the long-awaited solo debut of Hugh Allen — the chef who ran Vue de Monde’s kitchen and became the first Australian to lead two three-hatted restaurants at once before turning 30. This is fine dining stripped of the CBD tower view and rebuilt among the elms.

A native-ingredient tasting menu that turns a walk through a public park into the first course of the meal.

I have heard people saying that Yiaga was outstanding, remarkable, even brilliant. But given the popularity and relatively small size of the restaurant it has taken us nearly a year to visit and when the opportunity finally arose we were not disappointed, this was the meal of the year and the reviews are right, Yiaga stands out as one of Australia’s very finest restaurants.

AMBIENCE >

Getting to the table is part of the theatre. Diners enter through the Clarendon Street side of Fitzroy Gardens and walk a deliberately unhurried path past lake, conservatory and century-old Scottish elms before arriving at architect John Wardle’s low, glazed pavilion — a sequence chef Hugh Allen insisted on, believing the approach should matter as much as the meal. It is a rare thing in Melbourne dining: a genuine sense of arrival, engineered rather than accidental.

Inside, the room is soigné rather than showy. More than 13,000 individually formed terracotta tiles, hand-crafted by ceramicist Robert Gordon to a design by Wardle and Simon Lloyd, curve around the walls in a texture that echoes the bark of the elms visible through floor-to-ceiling glass. The 44 seats, including an eight-person semi-private dining room, all face the open kitchen rather than the garden view, a deliberate democratic touch so no table feels lesser than another. Furniture is entirely Australian-made — blackwood cellar and drinks trolley by Ross Thompson, chairs by Jon Goulder, hand-blown glassware by Alexandra Hirst — giving the space a warmth that reads as considered rather than curated for Instagram.

EAT >

Allen’s menu, priced at $320 for the full tasting experience, is a single nightly sitting built entirely around Australian farmers, fishers and foragers rather than imported prestige ingredients. Retired Blackmore Wagyu breeding cows — chosen for the depth of flavour that comes from a long life on pasture rather than a short one in a feedlot — anchor the protein courses, while Queensland coral trout and Gippsland dairy bring genuine regional range to the table.

Each dish is small, perfectly presented and made of fresh exciting flavours; a dish of coconut water and caviar is a triumph, the wagyu dish was almost impossible to describe in its ability to combine a sliver of meat into a small warm puff of flavour.

Native flora does real work here rather than sitting as garnish: river mint and Geraldton waxflower perfume several plates, and foraged wakame turns up in dessert, a reminder that Allen’s years at Noma clearly left their mark on how he thinks about foraging as technique rather than novelty. With a kitchen team of twelve working a single seating each service, dishes arrive at a measured pace that suits a menu this considered — this is a three-to-four-hour evening, not a quick pre-theatre dinner.

DRINK >

Yiaga offers three pairing tiers alongside the food menu: a $195 Beverage Pairing spanning Australian wine, beer and house-made drinks; a $395 Prestige Wine Pairing that sets standout Australian makers against selected Old and New World bottles; and a $120 non-alcoholic pairing built from seasonal juices, rare teas and house infusions. The structure reflects the same philosophy as the food — Australian producers given equal billing with international benchmarks, rather than treated as the budget option.

The cellar itself, carved from blackwood by furniture maker Ross Thompson, sits within the dining room rather than hidden away, and the sommelier team leans into telling the story behind each pour, which suits a restaurant built around provenance.

CONCLUSION >

Yiaga is not simply a new fine-diner; it is a fully realised argument for what contemporary Australian dining could look like when a serious chef is given a decade to think about it properly. Allen discovered this derelict Fitzroy Gardens pavilion during Melbourne’s first 2019 lockdown and spent six years turning it into a 44-seat restaurant built almost entirely from Australian materials and Australian produce.

Awarded three hats in the 2026 Good Food Guide within its first year, it is already one of the most credentialed openings the city has seen in some time. The $320 price point and single-nightly-sitting format put it firmly in special-occasion territory, but for that occasion, few Melbourne rooms currently offer this much conviction.

Hugh Allen started as an apprentice under Neil Perry at Rockpool, then went to what many consider the best restaurant in the world Noma, where he spent 3 years before joining Vue de Monde initially under Founding Chef Shannon Bennet. He took over as the Executive Chef of Vue de Monde in 2019 when Shannon Bennet resigned and he has led the restaurant from that time with Chris Marshall as the Head Chef. Yiaga was his vision and while he remains the Executive Chef for Vue de Monde, Yiaga is clearly his passion. The site Yiaga occupies has been feeding people, in one form or another, for well over a century. It opened in 1908 as the Kiosk Refreshment Rooms, a half-timbered Federation-era tearoom in the Fitzroy Gardens, and was extended in the 1920s into a fuller dining room. A fire in 1960 destroyed the original structure, and it was rebuilt in brick, later trading for decades as the Pavilion Café before closing and sitting vacant for close to ten years.

Hugh Allen came across the abandoned pavilion while walking through the gardens during Melbourne’s first COVID-19 lockdown in 2019, and immediately recognised it as the right site for the restaurant he had been dreaming of building “from scratch”. Allen’s own path to that moment was unusually fast: after formative stints at Noma in Copenhagen and its Sydney and Tulum pop-ups, he took over as executive chef of Vue de Monde at just 23 and went on to become the first Australian chef to run two three-hatted kitchens simultaneously before turning 30. (He remains executive chef at Vue de Monde while running Yiaga as his own venture).

For the rebuild, Allen brought in celebrated Australian architect John Wardle, who kept only the pavilion’s original roof and structural bones, wrapping everything beneath in the hand-formed terracotta tiling and Australian timber and glasswork described above. Wardle has described the collaboration as one that grew into “a deep friendship forged through a shared passion for makers and making”. The name Yiaga itself is drawn from the local Wurundjeri language, meaning “seek and find” — a nod both to the garden walk diners take to reach the restaurant and to the six-year search Allen undertook to find, and then rebuild, this particular site.

Click on images below to launch the lightbox