Seek and Find: Yiaga

Melbourne, in its own image

In a 1908 tearoom beneath the elms of Fitzroy Gardens, Hugh Allen has built the restaurant Melbourne has been waiting for. One year in, the rest of the world has noticed.

Melbourne has never been short of a good dinner. What it has quietly wanted, for a long time, is a restaurant that looks the way the city feels.

Not the skyline. The other Melbourne: weathered bluestone and impeccable tailoring, a gallery at lunch and a long table at dusk. A city that prefers craft to spectacle, and would much rather be discovered than announced.

Finally, it has one. Its name is Yiaga.

The house in the garden

The building began life in 1908 as the Kiosk Refreshment Rooms, a half-timbered tearoom where Edwardian Melbourne took its tea after a turn about the lawns. A dining room followed in the 1920s. Then, eventually, silence. Allen happened to wander past its disused remains while searching for a site, and knew immediately.

With architects Wardle, he has turned it into something closer to a private house than a dining room. Almost everything is Australian: the materials, the makers, the hands. A Tasmanian blackwood cellar by Ross Thompson. A table by furniture designer Vivienne Wong, shaped from a cypress branch taken from the Royal Botanic Gardens. Even the branding traces the outlines of native flora.

There are 44 seats, eight of them tucked into a semi-private room. The light arrives green, filtered through century-old elms. It is beautiful in the most Melbourne way possible: without a trace of fuss.

The prodigy comes home

Allen's CV reads like a dare. An apprenticeship with Rockpool at 16. Vue de Monde at 18. Then the United States, France and several years in Copenhagen, including a stint at Noma. He returned to Vue de Monde as executive chef at just 23, a role he still holds.

Yiaga, six years in the planning, is the first restaurant that is entirely his own. Born and raised here, he always knew it would open in Melbourne.

The name is an Indigenous word meaning to seek and find. It suits him. It suits the place even more.

At the table

The menu never sits still, and that is rather the point. Each visit is meant to feel like a small discovery, cooked by a kitchen in open conversation with the dining room.

The larder is unmistakably this country's: green ants and Dorrigo pepper, pepperberry, desert lime, wattleseed, gathered from farmers, fishers and growers the team works with directly. The cooking is precise and quietly inventive, yet it never talks over the produce.

What lingers is the intimacy. With so few seats and a chef who leads from the pass, the evening feels less like a service than a conversation. Tailor made, in the old sense of the word.

A first year, decorated

Yiaga opened on 16 October 2025. Its first birthday arrived with a cabinet most restaurants spend decades filling.

Those first three hats made Allen the first Australian chef to lead two three-hatted restaurants at once. Good Food Guide co-editor Emma Breheny has called Yiaga a "once-in-a-generation restaurant opening". For The 50 Best, senior content editor Rachael Hogg sees a dining room deeply connected to its surroundings and to the country's natural larder.

Allen, characteristically, sounds a little surprised. "We certainly never anticipated this in our first year," he says, crediting a team he considers among the best in the world.

On 4 November, The 50 Best Restaurants 2026 is revealed in Lima. Melbourne will be watching. So, it seems, will everyone else.

Beyond the last course

Allen's ambitions extend well past dessert. A structured apprenticeship programme is training the next generation of hospitality talent. Yiaga Sessions brings local and international experts together for conversations and workshops. In time, he imagines the old pavilion as a "campus of gastronomy": a place to eat, to learn and to show off what this country makes.

It is a very Melbourne ambition. This is a city that has always told its stories through craft, through the tailor, the roaster, the gallerist, the cook. It wears its best things lightly and expects you to find them.

Seek and find, the name instructs. Melbourne has.

The details

Yiaga, Fitzroy Gardens, East Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Country.

Dinner Thursday to Saturday, lunch Friday to Sunday.

Instagram: @yiaga.au