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Brunswick East does Italian along the top of Lygon Street, and this guide ranks the suburb's Italian rooms by their Curateria Score and what reviewers keep saying on their most recent visits, with chains and far suburbs left out. Wood-fired pizza and handmade pasta lead, and a few Italian wine bars earn their places on the food. These are the rooms Brunswick East diners actually name. Here is how they sit this month.
Top of the list is Compass Pizza Bar, the pizza bar reviewers rate for the wood-fired range and a pasta, the garlic prawn and Mad Max pizzas beside a pork pappardelle, a burrata pizza and mussels. Figlia follows, the room reviewers come to for the pasta and the pizza, the pappardelle and gnocchi beside the Cavolo, salami and broccoli wood-fired pizzas and a tiramisu.
400 Gradi - Brunswick is the high-volume room reviewers rate for the wood-fired pizza, the Margherita and an ox gnocchi beside a tagliolini alla pescatora, a Nutella calzone and a tiramisu. La Taverna is the room reviewers come to for the pizza and the gnocchi, the salmon, meat lovers and marinara pizzas beside a gnocchi with white sauce and a homemade mud cake. Bar Idda is the room reviewers rate for the Sicilian plates, the focaccia with anchovy, stracciatella and sweet red wine onions and a saffron arancini beside baked melanzane, vongole, a crab pasta and a ricotta gnocchi.
The Stonemill 347 Food & Wine Bar is the food and wine bar reviewers come to for the gnocchi and the pasta, the gnocchi ragu and gnocchi gorgonzola beside a spaghettini al granchio baked in cartoccio, Nonna's polpette and a tiramisu, a wine bar that earns its place on the food. Zia Teresa Restaurant is the room reviewers rate for the four-cheese gnocchi, the four-cheese gnocchi and a spaghetti misto mare beside a duck ragu, a seafood pasta, a saltimbocca and a tiramisu. ReWine is a wine bar reviewers come to for the pizza and a wine, the fig, goat's cheese and chilli honey pizza and a spicy eggplant pizza beside a gluten-free base and a pate, framed as the wine bar it is.
The list closes across the suburb. Abruzzo Club is the club reviewers rate for the pizza and the skewers, the pizzas and arrosticini Italian meat skewers beside pasta, a generous schnitzel, a ragu pasta and seafood platters. I Carusi Pizza is the room reviewers come to for the quattro formaggi, the Quattro Formaggi pizza and a gamberi picante beside a garlic focaccia with bocconcini. Bahama Gold is a bar reviewers rate for the wood-fired pizza and a wine, the wood-fired and vegan pizzas and the De Poaloe specialty pizzas beside margaritas and an Australian wine list, named as the bar it is, and Grana rounds it out, a wine bar reviewers come to for the salumi and a board, the Culatello, bresaola and venison salumi and an artisan cheese board beside pizza from the kitchen next door, framed as the bar it is.
If one thread here pulls you in, follow it across the city. There is a guide to the best Italian in Melbourne for the citywide picture, and a cross-cuisine tour of the best restaurants in Brunswick East for the rest of the suburb.
Every room here carries a Curateria Score built from its full review history, then weighted toward its most recent hundred reviews so the order reflects the room as it runs today, not as it ran two years ago. We hold the cohort to this one suburb and a tight inner-Melbourne radius, roughly 15km of the city, and we drop the multi-location chains and national franchises that trade on a logo more than a local following, so what is left reads as the genuine local order. Because a long-running room collects more reviews than a newcomer, we shrink the raw average toward the cohort mean for places with thin review counts, so a handful of glowing reviews cannot leapfrog a room a thousand diners have judged. Brunswick East's Italian cohort runs on pizza and pasta with a few Italian wine bars alongside, so the category gate keeps it to full-service Italian rooms and the bars that genuinely cook, each named for what it is. The corpus is Victorian and scored; no AI writer ever reads it. The ranking is arithmetic; the words are ours.
Explore more Italian in Brunswick East across Melbourne on Discover ->
Every venue here is ranked by its Curateria Score, a recent-review-weighted quality signal that leans on what diners are saying now, not years ago. Keep browsing Melbourne, sorted by Curateria Score, on Discover.
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