Best out of town restaurants

Loam

Drysdale

The best eating adventures you’ll have right now are not out of a truck, or hunched over a taco in a piss-soaked back alley. They’re not even in Melbourne at all. Just an hour’s drive out of the CBD will land you in a scraggly olive grove in Drysdale at a table you’ll need to have booked six weeks earlier if it's a Saturday.

The Royal Mail

Dunkeld

It’s a restaurant food fans nation-wide have been making the pilgrimage to over the past five years. In that time, chef Dan Hunter has built one of the most serious kitchen gardens in the country, complete with resident bees. He’s also made a real effort to transform the once-nondescript dining room into somewhere people will want to eat.

The Lake House

Daylesford

The menu is traditional country European cooking interspersed with Asian and molecular touches. One of those slow-cooked eggs sits in a bath of creamy whipped polenta with chopped-up wild slippery jack mushrooms. Next to it in a little glass is a mushroom consommé covered by a plate holding a single mushroom-covered crouton.

The Tea Rooms of Yarck

Yarck

This is a traditional Sardinian osteria set-up, meaning that whatever takes the chef's fancy that day is what lands on your table. It's a long drive, so consider having a sleepover in their accommodation at the converted church across the road.

Innocent Bystander

Healesville

Winery, fromagerie, bakery and pizza joint come together in a broad, bustling space where you can schlep it to the deck, or sit at the bar and seriously nerd out with the smartest hospitality guys and gals in the biz: the food and drink fans with the foresight to get out of town.

Annie Smithers Bristrot

Kyneton

This town is packing serious kitchen heat, and Annie Smithers started it all. Her red brick institution offers the true farm to table experience (she's running the veggie plot herself) where game and produce become rustic terrines, and thrice cooked lamb with fresh, seasonal sides.

Chris's Beacon Point Restaurant

Apollo Bay

Seafood and Greek influences rule: pockets of squid stuffed with pinenuts, spinach and sultanas on a fresh tomato, basil salad; the flakiest of baklava, filled with walnuts and bathing in a delicate pool of spiced honey syrup. Make sure to grab one of Chris's cabins so you're only toppling distance from wine bottle to bed.