Yiaga tops The Age Good Food Guide 2027 in Melbourne
Hugh Allen's 44-seat tasting-menu restaurant in Fitzroy Gardens takes restaurant of the year, as the guide also crowns Roma new restaurant of the year and keeps Vue de Monde and Brae on three hats.
Yiaga, the Fitzroy Gardens restaurant chef Hugh Allen opened a year ago, is Restaurant of the Year in The Age Good Food Guide 2027.
The Melbourne guide's new edition keeps Yiaga and Vue de Monde — where Allen remains executive chef — on three hats, alongside Brae in the Otways. Roma, Matt Wilkinson's new trattoria in the city, takes New Restaurant of the Year. Barragunda at Cape Schanck wins Regional Restaurant of the Year.
Yiaga occupies a 1908 pavilion in Fitzroy Gardens that sat empty for close to a decade before Allen, working with architect John Wardle, stripped it back to its roof and timber frame. The dining room seats 44, close enough to the pass that the kitchen is part of the room.
Hugh Allen didn't need a new kitchen to win it — just his own name on the door.
A tearoom turned tasting menu
The menu runs multiple courses built around produce Allen sources directly: pasture-fed Blackmore wagyu, wakame divers pull from Victoria's coast, Gippsland dairy, coral trout flown in from Queensland. Gourmet Traveller had already named the restaurant its Best New Restaurant for 2026, months before this award arrived.
Allen took the top job at Vue de Monde in 2019, at 23, and was named the magazine's Chef of the Year in 2023. Yiaga, open since October 2025, is his first restaurant as an owner rather than an employee — a distinction the Guide's judges singled out in handing it the top prize over venues with longer track records.
Three hats hold, one newcomer arrives
Vue de Monde's third hat confirms the Rialto-tower fixture is still cooking at the level that has kept it there for most of three decades, now with Allen directing a kitchen he no longer runs day to day. Brae, Dan Hunter's restaurant in regional Victoria, keeps a rating it has held for most of the past ten years.
Roma's arrival points the other way: toward simpler, trattoria-style rooms rather than tasting menus. Wilkinson, who built his name at Pope Joan and Easey's, has said the format was a deliberate step back from fine dining's costs and expectations — proof the Guide still rewards restraint as readily as ambition.
The best tables in Melbourne list already carried several of this year's winners before the new Guide landed. What the award changes is bookings: Yiaga's waitlist, already weeks long, is unlikely to shorten before Christmas.
