Australian food has ruined me.

In the last two weeks, I’ve eaten homemade Malaysian fish ball soup, Colombian tamales, North Indian street snacks, Filipino crispy pork leg, pub meals spanning prawn toast to Lancashire hotpot, Korean army stew, Balinese babi guling, pandan chiffon cake, and steak tartare prepared tableside. Each meal has been as good as – if not better than – its homeland counterpart.

Watching the final episodes of MasterChef, I was reminded just how good Aussie talent is. You won’t find those dishes anywhere else in the world, but if you could, any food lover would gladly pay top fine-dining dollar for them. I’ve also had conversations with established chefs and seasoned food critics about the epicurean curse of travelling as an Australian, where meals in cities like Paris, Los Angeles, and Hanoi sometimes feel like an anticlimax. It’s not that they aren’t wonderful, it’s just that the culinary bar back home is thrillingly high. It begs the question: why travel to eat at all?

I’ll tell you why: there’s no better way to deepen your understanding of what’s on your doorstep. There’s an extra level of connection and admiration that comes from recognising a dish’s roots, whether a carbon copy of the “original” or its reinvention. A dish’s origins provide context; grounding it in history, geography, climate, migration, memory and identity.

Earlier this year I found myself comparing xiao long bao from a breakfast queue in Taipei with what I’m used to at HuTong in Melbourne. I realised I wasn’t interested in crowning the “better” dumpling, but rather exploring the delicious in-between. I started to join the dots: a Chinese migrant opens the first Din Tai Fung in Taiwan in 1972, leading to the global popularisation of soup dumplings. Fast-forward to 2008, and Din Tai Fung arrives in Australia via Sydney – the same year HuTong opens in the world's longest continuously-running Chinatown, established in 1850s Melbourne. Food might be a universal language, but it’s spoken in accents shaped by place.

The more I eat abroad, the more I appreciate what we have at home. It makes me value the brilliance and resilience of cooks who have bridged two (or more) worlds. Food without context still tastes good, but food with it means something. This week, I found that meaning in a BYO Malaysian gem in Melbourne; declare that butter is officially trending; share a deceptively easy fish and chorizo stew recipe to transport you to the Mediterranean; and give my take on two of Australia’s most hyped openings.

One of the perks of being on MasterChef is that I occasionally get to take home leftover ingredients (the majority goes to SecondBite). A few months back, there were a few Southern Rock lobsters up for grabs. I made lobster rolls from the flesh and seafood stock from the shells. I defrosted the latter last week for this Portuguese-Spanish hybrid fish and chorizo stew, laced with saffron and served with onion bread from Little Sister Bakery. It serves 6 people and only takes about 40 minutes if you have stock on hand (or in the carton). Feel free to swap chorizo for prawns to make it pescatarian.

Ingredients

Method

Bullfrog in XO. Salted egg lobster. Bak kut teh (pork rib soup). These are just a few of the dishes I spent far too long poring over at Baba Chef. The friendly owner, Eddie, must have asked us four times if we were ready to order. Originally opened in Doncaster, Baba Chef launched this Kew East outpost in the final days of 2024. Signs that a solid meal lay ahead were hard to miss: a neon “open" sign, dish photos printed on A4 paper and taped to the window, a blue glow from a live seafood tank, and tables of Chinese and Malaysian families lifting noodles and ladling out claypots.

I brought my mum and immediately wished we had more people so we could order more. Baba Chef is known for its bouncy homemade fishballs. Ours arrived in an enormous bowl of soup, streaked with ribbons of chive, cubes of pig’s blood, and slices of house-made fishcake (FYI, they sell the fishballs for $35 a kilogram). A surprise hit was homemade tofu with mushrooms: slippery, saucy, and with slight floral sweetness, thanks to a scattering of goji berries. To balance the textures, we added deep-fried soft-shell crab in salted egg yolk. It was a natural fit with a cold beer, though next time I’d go for salted egg prawns. And there will be a next time – I've earmarked it for my birthday.

Pro tip: if you're after laksa, drop by for lunch any day of the week, or for dinner from Monday to Thursday.

647 High Street, Kew East, Melbourne, instagram.com/babachefaus

Restaurants have always known the power of good butter – whether cultured in-house, smoked, or whipped into silky submission – but now the obsession is spilling into home kitchens and across social media. Recently, restaurants and food brands have been teaming up (think Del Bocia x MoVida’s anchovy butter, or the triple-threat cacio e pepe butter from Madeleine Butter x Maker & Monger x Pep). Artisan Australian butters have featured heavily in Good Food and Broadsheet this year, while Instagram and TikTok are serving up recipes for everything from holographic butter to radish butter terrine with the appearance of stained glass. What’s driving it? A confluence of factors: comfort-food nostalgia, the appeal of fancy butter as an affordable luxury in wallet-watching times, the viral power of visual food trends, and a growing desire to know not just where our ingredients come from, but to connect with their story. It’s a perfect storm that has people buying butter first, and treating bread as the support act. I’m all for it.

Bessie’s: 111-115 Albion Street, Surry Hills, NSW
Some restaurants sit right at the intersection of everything that makes Australian dining great: chefs building dishes around local produce, a respectful mash-up of global flavours, the effortless casual-cool vibe whether you’re grazing at a wine bar or dropping $60 on a main, and a playfulness that finds its way onto the plate. Bessie’s, from the team behind Bar Copains, nails this. We kicked off with a joyfully retro combo of the house mortadella and devilled eggs, followed by crunchy rectangular hash browns laid with fleshy raw tuna hiding a layer of caponata – like eating omakase at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market and a McDonald’s hangover brekkie all at once. Then came a nostalgic Moreton Bay bug sandwich on soft white bread rounds; plump mushrooms draped in melting lardo with a rich egg yolk; a juicy coil of house-made chorizo, its richness penetrated by punchy mojo verde; and finally, the sweetest, creamiest, wood-fired prawns swimming in paprika oil. No wonder Bessie’s is packed.

Harriot: 555 Collins Street, Melbourne, VIC
Dining out with fellow food lovers is one of my favourite things to do. There’s a shared obsession that would likely bore anyone else, but which shapes the whole experience. I had the pleasure of eating with Good Food restaurant critic Besha Rodell during one of her visits to Harriot in the CBD, the newest feather in the hospitality hat that includes Tipo 00, Osteria Ilaria, Figlia and Grana (you can read her review here). You might expect that, between bites of ruby-red bluefin tuna tartlets, gnocchi buried in intoxicating amounts of black truffle, and Aylesbury duck served three ways, we’d be deep in eloquent writerly analysis. In reality, we just kept saying, “That’s good,” and, “That’s really good,” over and over. I’ve already booked a return visit. If you ask me, that’s the ultimate sign of a great restaurant.