How to celebrate Thanksgiving in Melbourne

Can't accommodate all your friends and family in your home? Host a much bigger party outside. Cook your turkey at home and reheat it on one of Melbourne's many free gas barbecues. Read on for some of our favourite spots. 

Forego the traditional Thanksgiving foods and lean into American joints like Fancy Hanks and Meatmaiden. When you're craving some Southern-style barbecue action, head to these Melbourne hot spots dishing up brisket, wings, ribs and all the sides. 

You really don’t have to look very hard to pick up a decent beer these days. Every corner store and chain liquor retailer will have a selection of something worth your time. But finding those goldmines of great beers, encyclopedic staff knowledge and a bit of ambience can be tough, so we’ve done the hard yards for you and picked the best crafty bottle shops around Melbourne.

You don't need hot turkey and mashed potatoes to be thankful. Hit up one of our favourite picnic spots, ask your friends to bring a dish, and enjoy a springtime Thanksgiving, Australia-style.

If you're going traditional, make sure you order a turkey from one of our favourite butchers well in advance. Most butchers don't stock whole turkeys until December, but almost all can get turkeys in with a week or so notice. Pro tip: ask your butcher to cut the bird into pieces, or at the very least, spatchcock it. You will not get the Norman Rockwell-style whole bird moment. You will get properly cooked turkey without drying out the white meat, for once.

The Thanksgiving shop is probably the biggest shop of the year, a trek through multiple stores laden down with bags full to bursting. But save time (and those fingers – heavy plastic bags have a special kind of bite!) and order your groceries from one of these delivery services. You can get all the potatoes and butter you need (buy extra) without the hassle of schlepping everything across town.

USA Foods is the closest Melbourne has to Willy Wonka's factory, with American candy of all kinds, hot sauces, breakfast cereals, hard-to-source Mexican ingredients and more. Most importantly for Thanksgiving purposes, this Yankee paradise sells cornbread mix, premade pie crusts and pumpkin in a can. Yes, of course it's Libby's.

Some of our favourite bars are getting into the Thanksgiving spirit, with Thanksgiving-themed cocktails at happy hour prices for the week of November 24. 

Sustainability-focused Fitzroy bar Ends and Means is serving up a Pumpkin Pie cocktail, made with Angels Envy Kentucky bourbon, pumpkin and cinnamon. Live music pub the Catfish is making a special Cranbourbon Catfizz, made with Angel’s Envy bourbon, cranberry syrup, lemon, cranberry juice and soda. And one of Melbourne's standard-setting cocktail bars, the Elysian, has created a drink called Pumpkin Spice and Everything Nice, with Angels Envy bourbon, pumpkin spice syrup, bitters, lemon juice and ginger ale.

Colour us definitely thankful. 

American craft distillery-made Westward whiskey is now available in Australia, and it would go perfectly in a Thanksgiving-y cocktail like an Old Fashioned (or you can just leave the Old Fashioneds to the experts and hit up one of these Melbourne bars).

Westward has created this recipe for the ultimate Thanksgiving Old Fashioned:

Ingredients:
60mL / 2oz single-malt whiskey
8mL / 0.25oz chai tea syrup (Monin makes one, or you could make it yourself)
Dash of bitters
Cinnamon quill

Method:
1. Pour the whiskey, chai tea syrup and bitters into a mixing glass and stir
2. Pour into an Old Fashioned rocks glass on a large cube
3. Garnish with a cinnamon quill

Don't want to mess around with making a cocktail? If you want a whisky that embodies the Thanksgiving flavours of citrus peel, cinnamon, nutmeg, toffee, stewed apple and vanilla custard, get your hands on a bottle of Lark's Christmas Cask 2021 whisky. The Tasmanian distillery's limited-edition whisky is described as 'Christmas in a glass', but we're pretty sure it would be just the thing after a Thanksgiving feast, too.