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South Yarra does Italian around Chapel 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. Handmade pasta leads, wood-fired pizza sits alongside, and these are the rooms South Yarra diners actually name. Here is how they sit this month.
Top of the list is Cosi Bar Ristorante South Yarra - Italian Restaurant Since 1996, the long-running ristorante reviewers rate for the pasta and the truffle, the duck ravioli and a wagyu carpaccio with truffle mayo beside a truffle risotto, a cotoletta, a seafood linguine and a tiramisu. Stella Restaurant and Bar follows, the restaurant and bar reviewers come to for the ragu and the pizza, the beef ragu pappardelle and a butternut pumpkin pizza beside burrata, a fettuccine with spanner crab and a basque cheesecake.
Cucinetta Melb South Yarra - Italian Restaurant Est. 2013 is the room reviewers rate for the lobster linguine, the linguine al aragosta and a cheese-wheel pasta finished tableside beside a wagyu carpaccio and a rotating weekly menu. A25 Pizzeria South Yarra is the pizzeria reviewers come to for the pizza and a pasta, the Prawnstar and San Daniele pizzas beside a ragu pasta, calamari and a basque cheesecake. Caffe e Cucina is the room reviewers rate for the seafood pasta, the parchment-wrapped seafood linguine beside calamari, a beef cheek ravioli, a carpaccio di manzo and a tiramisu.
Thirty Eight Chairs is the room reviewers come to for the pappardelle, the duck ragu and seafood marinara pappardelle beside a ciabatta with truffle butter, a beef carpaccio and a tiramisu. Oltre - Alimentari e Cucina is the alimentari and cucina reviewers rate for the classics, the carbonara and a gnocchi with ragu beside burrata, a caprese, a Napoli pizza and a tiramisu. 🍕48h Pizza e Gnocchi Bar - Italian Restaurant in South Yarra is the pizza and gnocchi bar reviewers come to for the pizza and the gnocchi, the Di Parma pizza and a porcini pasta beside a Mare Nostrum cheese fondue, a ragu gnocchi and a tiramisu.
The list closes across the suburb. Chapelli's is the room reviewers rate for the seafood pasta and the sweets, the seafood pasta beside a cheesecake, a sticky date cake and parmesan crisps. Bar Carolina is the bar reviewers come to for the cotoletta and the pasta, the cotoletta alla Milanese and a crab spaghettini beside a carbonara, a mushroom truffle arancini and scallops. Republic Economica is a bar that earns its place on cheap, generous Italian plates rather than a full dining menu, the nine-dollar spaghetti Napoletana and a nine-dollar garlic pizza beside a steak sandwich and a nine-dollar Negroni, framed as exactly that, and Da Noi rounds it out, the room reviewers rate for the handmade pasta and the degustation, a seasonal degustation and culurgionis beside a suckling pig and a mille feuille.
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 South Yarra 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. South Yarra's Italian cohort runs on pasta and pizza, so the category gate keeps it to full-service Italian rooms and the bars that genuinely cook, while a venue with no real food evidence is filtered out. The corpus is Victorian and scored; no AI writer ever reads it. The ranking is arithmetic; the words are ours.
Explore more Italian in South Yarra 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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