This year’s Good Food Guide is your dining to-do list of what’s eating well in Victoria

If we had to sum up our year as Good Food Guide editors in just one word, it might be chawanmushi. The delicate dashi custard broke free of its Japanese mould and dominated fine dining everywhere in the state from Ballarat to Hurstbridge.

Our Korean vocabulary grew thanks to a surge of young restaurateurs going beyond Australia’s K-mainstays of the past decade. Greek dining meant skipping the lamb and eating your vegetables, as more homespun menus took hold. And The Age Good Food Guide 2026 might be the first to contain the words “pork spine soup”; it won’t be the last.

All these singular dishes, the people shaping our cities, and the latest and greatest places to eat right now are captured in The Age Good Food Guide 2026, which was launched yesterday at the annual awards ceremony.

It contains reviews of nearly 500 venues across the state, from takeaway shawarma joints to dazzling degustations that are a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Torquay, Campbellfield, Bentleigh, Sunshine, Beechworth – they’re all in the mix.

Every review can be found on the Good Food app, a pocket-sized Guide that’s always up-to-date. Whip out your phone and search for venues nearby; filter restaurants by cuisine or price; and make your own lists such as “family friendly” or “wine bars”.

For a more immediate look at the state of dining right now, we’ve introduced the Critics’ Picks List, a magazine with 123 reviews hand-picked by us, the editors of the Guide, which is available as an 80-page liftout in today’s Age. Think of it as your dining to-do list: a time capsule of what’s eating especially well in the state of Victoria today.

There are 40-year-old institutions that continue to school us in the art of service. There are four-month-old restaurants on the rise. There’s an exciting new lunch spot spinning Japanese convenience store snacks through a Melbourne lens, plus a Mexican restaurant that goes well beyond the taco, and three-hatted fine diners to boot.

Speaking of, there are 136 hats in this year’s Guide, ranging from Korean fine diners and late-night soup specialists through to big-ticket steakhouses.

Hats, of course, represent a level of excellence that makes them a cut above. As always, any venue with a hat or above was reviewed again for this year’s Guide, and our reviewers visited anonymously and paid their own way.

But the more we talk about it, we find that although hatted restaurants are an important part of the conversation, they don’t paint the whole picture of dining in Victoria in 2025.

That’s why this year we expanded our Critics’ Picks (marked by a tick) to include every kind of restaurant. Hatted or not, they’re the places our editors urge you to visit. To discover something new. To be reminded of how our cities, towns and suburbs have evolved (and are still evolving). To luxuriate in the pleasure of dining somewhere at its peak.

All you need to remember is The Age Good Food Guide meets you wherever you are and however you like to eat. Print, digital, however you access it, consider the 2026 Guide your essential survey of Victorian dining for here and now.

A free 80-page Good Food Guide liftout is inserted in The Age today. The Good Food app is the home of the 2026 edition of the Good Food Guide, with more than 500 reviews. The app is free for premium subscribers of The Age and also available as a standalone subscription. You can download the Good Food app here.