Food Tours in Australia

You will hear this confidently in Melbourne, in Sydney and in Auckland, usually with a specific year and sometimes with a name. The evidence does not support any of the versions.

The Oxford English Dictionary records the term from 1971. A coffee historian places it as probably English, from the 1950s. It appears in a British film in 1963. The earliest Australian attestations found are from May 1983 and April 1984. What happened in 1985 is that a Sydney café owner put it on a menu permanently, which is a different claim from inventing it. The New Zealand counterclaims do not have documentation of equivalent quality.

So the honest position is that the question is open, and that a drink this ordinary probably emerged in several places at once. What Melbourne can claim without argument is the density and the standard: this is a city where a bad coffee is a complaint rather than a fact of life, and where the barista is a profession rather than a summer job.

Ordering here: a flat white is espresso with steamed milk and minimal foam. A long black is espresso poured over hot water, not the reverse. A magic, which you will only meet in Melbourne, is a double ristretto in a small flat white.

The espresso bar at 66 Bourke Street opened in 1954, run by the brothers Leo and Vildo Pellegrini. It received National Trust recognition in 2014 and its neon sign is on the Victorian Heritage Register.

It is often described as the first espresso bar in Australia, and the accurate version is narrower: it was among the first to use a genuine Italian espresso machine and it was the first in the city centre, while a number of Italian-Australian cafés in Lygon Street, Carlton acquired machines in the same period. Competing claims about who imported the first machine are not documented well enough to repeat.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because the story of Melbourne coffee is not one bar but a neighbourhood: Carlton, Fitzroy and the city blocks in between, where a post-war community rebuilt the way a whole city drank.

Not a dumpling, and not the same thing as dim sum. The dim sim is a larger, denser parcel of minced meat and cabbage in a thick wrapper, steamed or deep fried, sold from fish and chip shops and market stalls across Victoria.

The modern version was developed in Melbourne's Chinatown in 1945 by William Chen Wing Young, for the family firm Wing Lee, though the term itself is attested in Australia from 1928. The big, round, deep-fried variety is known as the South Melbourne dim sim, after the market where it was popularised.

It is genuinely local, it is cheap, and it is the thing to eat at a market stall rather than in a restaurant. One thing not to expect: the pie floater, a meat pie in pea soup, belongs to Adelaide rather than Melbourne, and it turns up in Melbourne food writing far more often than it turns up in Melbourne.

Almost half the catalogue is not a Melbourne food tour, and six of those nine are wine days in the Yarra Valley, an hour north east. They are also the two most reviewed products on the page, at 119 and 214 EUR, so this is what the market is buying.

The valley is a cool climate region: pinot noir, chardonnay, sparkling wine, with cheese and gin producers along the same roads. A grazing style tour at 119 EUR takes in several of them; the 214 EUR listing is a fuller wine day.

Two further listings go further afield and are worth flagging. One is built around Phillip Island, where the main attraction is the evening penguin parade and the food is secondary. The other is a restaurant on a moving train on the Bellarine peninsula, about ninety minutes away, which is a lovely thing and is not a tour of Melbourne.

The genuine Melbourne food tours are the five laneway walks, at 87 to 102 EUR for six or seven tastings over two to three hours, plus the market and Chinatown options at 48 to 70.

Melbourne is in the southern hemisphere, so the seasons are reversed: December to February is summer, June to August is winter. The city has a reputation for changeable weather that is entirely deserved, and layers are not a joke here.

The date worth planning around is the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, founded in 1993 and held every March, which is also when the weather is at its most reliable: warm, dry and past the peak of summer heat.

The laneway walks run year round and are largely weatherproof, since the point of a laneway is that it is narrow and often covered. The Yarra Valley days are better from October to April.