Food Tours · Tour

Seven Tastings Through the Arcades, Ending in a Bar

Melbourne hides its food, and it does it deliberately. The best places are up staircases, behind unmarked doors and down lanes you would walk past. Three hours with a local is the shortcut. Seven tastings: two savoury, three sweet, and two drinks, which between them are meant to explain what Melbourne actually eats. The coffee is roasted here and is the reason the city argues about coffee with the rest of the world. There are dumplings from Chinatown, hole-in-the-wall street food, a sweet stop and a drink in a laneway bar the locals use. What lifts it is the buildings. The route takes in the Royal Arcade, the oldest shopping arcade in Australia; the Block Arcade, which dates from the years when Melbourne was one of the richest cities on earth; the Manchester Unity Building, the talk of the town when it opened in 1932; Centre Place and Degraves Street, which are the laneways every photograph of the city is taken in; Flinders Street Station; and Chinatown, the oldest in the Southern Hemisphere, running since the 1850s gold rush. Ten people at most, in English. The guide's local recommendations for restaurants and bars come with the ticket, which is worth as much as the tour if you are here for a few days. It finishes in Hardware Lane, five minutes' walk from where it started. Wheelchair accessible, service animals allowed, prams fine. You must state dietary restrictions or allergies when booking, or write that you have none.