THE LOWDOWN · 8 min read

Tipo 00 has quietly become the most-booked Italian in Melbourne. Here’s why it earned it.

TIPO 00 · PASTA · ROOM
By the curator

The best restaurants in St Kilda right now

St Kilda eats by the beach, and this guide tours the suburb rather than ranking one kind of food. Mediterranean and wood-fired pizza lead, a seafood institution looks out over the bay, and Vietnamese, Mexican and a cocktail bar fill out a beachside spread. We ranked the rooms St Kilda diners actually name by their Curateria Score and what reviewers keep saying on their most recent visits, with chains and far suburbs left out. Here is the order this month.

Top of the list is Jode's Mediterranean Eatery in St Kilda, the Mediterranean eatery reviewers call absolutely amazing, the grilled chicken healthy meal bowl and the falafel platter beside pita pockets, homemade hummus and a lamb kofta grill, the portions generous and the welcome warm. Holy Trinity trois-cent in St Kilda follows, the pizza-and-pasta room reviewers call easily the best pizza in Australia, the Spartan 300 and the nine-ingredient pizza beside a carbonara, a prawn pasta and a galaktoboureko.

Republica St Kilda Beach in St Kilda is the beachfront bar and eatery on St Kilda Beach, the room reviewers stop at for afternoon cocktails, the fish and chips and the sourdough pizza beside a mushroom risotto, a salmon tartare and a peanut-butter espresso martini. Flour Child St Kilda in St Kilda is the Roman-pinsa pizza room reviewers rate for a bottomless brunch, the carbonara and bolognese pinsas beside polpette, burrata, a vodka pasta and lasagna fritters. Donovans in St Kilda is the seafood institution on the water, the room reviewers call truly exceptional, the charcoal prawns and the barramundi beside a beef tartare, a spanner crab ravioli and a sticky date souffle, the view of St Kilda Beach a highlight.

Rococo St Kilda in St Kilda is the wood-fired Italian room reviewers call an awesome dining experience, the Margherita D.O.P. and the Calabrese pizzas beside a seafood spaghetti, a pappardelle osso buco and a baked ricotta gnocchi. Ellora St Kilda in St Kilda is the all-day room reviewers give a ten out of ten, the mac-and-cheese croquettes and the halloumi beside a seafood pizza, fish tacos and a bottomless-brunch bagel spread. Topolino's in St Kilda is the long-running Italian room some reviewers have eaten at for thirty-eight years, the pizza and the fettuccine carbonara beside a spaghetti marinara, a lasagna and a seafood pizza.

The list closes across the suburb. St LuJa | Cocktail Bar in St Kilda is a cocktail bar that feeds you well, framed as exactly that, the craft cocktails and the Guinness on tap beside Tasmanian oysters, scallops and chips, reviewers calling it a slice of Dublin. Saigon Street Eats - St Kilda in St Kilda is the Vietnamese street-eats room reviewers call simply great food, the rare-and-poached beef pho and the chicken pho beside rice paper rolls, a banh mi and a tofu papaya salad. Cicciolina in St Kilda is the classic Italian room reviewers have heard about for years, the spaghetti vongole and the blue-swimmer-crab souffle beside a house tagliatelle with prawns and finger-lime butter and a risotto with bugs, and Juana Taco in St Kilda rounds it out, the Mexican room reviewers call the best in Melbourne, the birria tacos and the fish tacos beside chicken enchiladas and a margarita on taco Tuesday.

If one thread here pulls you in, follow it across the city. There is a guide to the best Italian in Melbourne for the St Kilda pizza rooms, the best fish and chips in Melbourne for the beachfront, and the best Mexican in Melbourne for Juana Taco. Or read the rest of this pilot: the best restaurants in Fitzroy, the best restaurants in Carlton, the best restaurants in Brunswick and the best restaurants in Richmond.

How we ranked it

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 the suburb itself 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 is beachside on the evidence, the room on St Kilda Beach and the seafood institution on the water both named by their own diners for the view as much as the food. The one cocktail bar that makes the list earns it on a real kitchen, the oysters and scallops doing the talking, and is framed as that, while any bar with no 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.

Keep exploring

Explore more 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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