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St Kilda does Italian by the beach, 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 leads, handmade pasta sits alongside, and a couple of pizza bars earn their places on the food. These are the rooms St Kilda diners actually name. Here is how they sit this month.
Top of the list is Holy Trinity trois-cent, the pizza-and-pasta room reviewers call the best pizza around, the Spartan 300 and the nine-ingredient pizza beside a Heaven pizza with blue cheese, a carbonara, a prawn pasta and a galaktoboureko. Republica St Kilda Beach follows, the beachfront room reviewers rate for the food and the spot, fish and chips and a sourdough pizza beside a mushroom risotto, a salmon tartare and a peanut butter espresso martini.
Flour Child St Kilda is the Roman-pinsa room reviewers come to for a bottomless brunch, the carbonara and bolognese pinsas beside polpette, burrata, a vodka pasta and lasagna fritters, a pizza bar that earns its place on the food. Rococo St Kilda is the wood-fired room reviewers call an awesome dining experience, a Margherita D.O.P. and a Calabrese pizza beside a seafood spaghetti, a baked ricotta gnocchi and a pappardelle osso buco. Topolino's is the long-running room reviewers rate for the classics, pizza and a fettuccine carbonara beside a spaghetti marinara, a lasagna and a seafood pizza.
Cicciolina is the room reviewers come to for the seafood pasta, a spaghetti vongole and a blue swimmer crab souffle beside a house-made tagliatelle with prawns and finger lime butter, a risotto with bugs and a tiramisu. Handcrafted Pizza & Burger is the room reviewers rate for the handcrafted pizza, the fresh-made bases and a three-cheese garlic bread beside a chicken parma, a King Capricciosa and a lamb souvlaki pizza. Sorsi e Morsi is the room reviewers come to for an Italian-leaning breakfast and lunch, breakfast pancakes with orange mascarpone and a crudo panini beside scrambled eggs with mushrooms and a panini selection.
The list closes across the suburb. Fat Lulu's Pizza and Bar is a pizza bar reviewers rate for the bottomless pizza and a pasta, a pesto linguine and a carbonara beside a BBQ chicken pizza, a prosciutto pizza and a garlic herb and cheese pizza, named as the pizza bar it is. Pesto's Ristorante Italiano is the ristorante reviewers come to for the homemade pasta, a pan-fried gnocchi and arancini beside a chicken Alfredo, a pumpkin pappardelle and a panna cotta. The Vineyard Restaurant is the room reviewers rate for a hearty plate, a rigatoni and a lamb shoulder beside calamari and gnocchi in pesto or mushroom, and The Banff rounds it out, the room reviewers come to for pizza and pasta with a big breakfast alongside, a Margherita and bocconcini pizza and a paper bag mushroom linguine beside a risotto, fritters and sliders.
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 St Kilda 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. St Kilda's Italian cohort runs on pizza and pasta, so the category gate keeps it to full-service Italian rooms and the pizza 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 St Kilda 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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