Wishbone opens in Melbourne's new Midtown tower

Wishbone, a Hong Kong-inspired diner from restaurateurs Chris and Sarah Lucas, opens this month at the base of a new tower on Melbourne's Bourke Street.

Wishbone Melbourne enters a 48-storey tower

The restaurant takes the ground floor of 435 Bourke Street, a 48-storey tower that cost more than A$1 billion to build, in the city's Midtown precinct. Its entrance sits on McKillop Street rather than the main Bourke Street frontage, and the building carries a Six Star Green Star rating; Wishbone's kitchen runs almost entirely on induction and electric heat.

A red staircase glimpsed through curved windows is the loudest thing about an otherwise glass tower.

Two woodfire ovens are the exception, reserved for char siu pork and roast duck. Around them, chef Dan Chan has built a menu of steamed and fried dumplings, prawn toast and hand-cut noodles, with a weekend yum cha service that sends dumplings and buns round the room on trays rather than a printed order sheet.

Chan is Hong Kong-born and spent time at Yardbird in that city before moving to Melbourne, where he has led the kitchen at Tombo Den, another Lucas restaurant, since September 2024. "The development of the menu is very close to my heart and draws on my time in Hong Kong, as well as broader travel," he said, describing the city's food culture as "a brilliant, chaotic mix of influences."

A dining room built with DKO Architecture

Chris and Sarah Lucas designed the room with DKO Architecture around a palette of deep reds and furnishings pulled from the 1950s through the 1970s. A flight of red perspex stairs is visible from McKillop Street through curved windows, a signal flare against a tower otherwise finished in glass and steel. Sarah Lucas called the finished space "cinematic, seductive and textured."

Chris Lucas, whose past projects include the Japanese restaurant Kisumé, said the ambition was more modest than the architecture suggests: "ultimately it's about creating something that belongs to Melbourne's famed laneways," even from a tower lobby several storeys removed from street level.

Wishbone's arrival adds to a busy month for Melbourne openings; Petit Crenn Melbourne, a 40-seat French room on Collins Street, also opened its doors in October. A Greek restaurant, Noẽma, is planned for the same Midtown tower later this year, part of a wider push to fill the building's ground floor with all-day dining rather than coffee kiosks.

Bookings opened only in the weeks before service began. For a fuller picture of what else is worth the trip, AMUSE keeps a running list of the best restaurants in Melbourne worth booking this year.