Time Out Food & Drink Awards 2022: Best Regional Restaurant

For those who had ever frequented the Continental Hotel's upper level back in its heyday, stepping into Audrey's will come as a pleasant shock. It would be an understatement to say the space – once affectionately known as 'the dungeon at the Conti' – was previously far less refined than its current iteration as Scott Pickett's (Smith St Bistrot, Estelle, Chancery Lane) new dazzler. Audrey’s is about as far from a dungeon as it gets, with wall-to-wall windows lining the dining room overlooking sea views of Sorrento. You arrive to plush green velvet booths, white tablecloths and a grand raw marble bar with caviar, oysters and seafood atop.

It takes a full day to dine at Brae. A meal at Victoria’s most highly decorated fine dining institution fits a micro holiday into the hours needed to get out to the gently sloping paddocks of Birregurra (an easy two-hour drive from Melbourne), dine in rural splendour at an appropriately relaxed pace at Dan Hunter’s famous farmhouse restaurant, and return home. You could make it a genuine mini-break should your budget stretch to the additional $635 for a night in one of the six guest suites on site (breakfast included), but it’s hard to think of a more pleasant day trip than one centred around the country’s pre-eminent dining experience.

We all felt the loss when Aaron Turner went away to Nashville after closing Loam, the restaurant that made the Bellarine sexy. We all cheered when he finally returned, rather alarmingly more beardy than before, and opened the Hot Chicken Project – particularly the good people of Geelong, upon whom he bestowed the finger-lickin’ good times. Now he’s doubled down on Victoria’s second city by opening Igni, a restaurant that lives up to his talent. People of Melbourne, start your engines.

Taking the easy road is not part of the Bertoncello family values. Blayne and Chayse, the brothers behind ambitious fine-diner O.My have overcome fire, a pandemic and a relocation in the last 12 months without skipping a beat or compromising any of their exacting standards. Farm-to-plate is an overused term but that’s the most succinct way to describe what the brothers Bertoncello are doing at their 25-seat restaurant in Beaconsfield on Melbourne’s fringe. This is the third location of O.My, after a fire in November 2020 engulfed the old Beaconsfield post office that housed the restaurant. Disaster struck just one day after the restaurant reopened following Melbourne’s long second lockdown. 

Entering a long driveway through two imposing pyramid-shaped metal structures on an otherwise ordinary country road is as close to falling down the rabbit hole as one can get on the Mornington Peninsula. Well, more of a jackalope hole than a rabbit one to be exact. The jackalope, a mythical hybrid creature crossed between a jackrabbit and an antelope, is the metaphorical and literal centrepiece of the surreal wonderland that exists in the middle of Merricks at Jackalope Hotel (Emily Floyd’s seven-metre Jackalope sculpture stands tall in the middle of the car park). Rare Hare, the less formal of two restaurants on site, is one of the main characters and shining stars of Jackalope’s fanciful micro-universe. 

Time Out readers have chosen their favourite restaurant, bar, pub and café in Melbourne in 2022. Did your top picks make the cut?