Yiaga

You walk through Fitzroy Gardens to find it, and that is the point. Yiaga sits where the old Pavilion Café stood since 1963, a single-storey structure that had been abandoned for close to a decade before Hugh Allen, walking through the park six years ago, passed the site and decided he would open his first restaurant there. The name means “seek and find” in the Wurundjeri language, and the arrival is choreographed to match: a layered sequence of garden, path, doorway, portal, reception, cellar, a deliberate decompression between the public park and the room itself.

The room is a collaboration between Allen and architect John Wardle, who had never designed a restaurant before, and that inexperience shows in the best way: there is nothing recycled about it. A continuous curved wall of 13,000 hand-made terracotta tiles wraps the space in ochre warmth, their texture echoing the bark of the elms lining the path outside. Tables radiate from a strikingly open kitchen, all of it looking out through floor-to-ceiling glass onto the gardens. Nothing at Yiaga is off-the-shelf: the ceramics, the glassware, the knives and the uniforms were all made specifically for the room, because Allen did not want to use anything another restaurant was using.

The tasting menu moves through Australian ingredients with a balanced sense of brightness: a cooling green sorbet of sea parsley, finger lime and olive oil to begin; squid in a broth of Thai basil and desert lime; school prawns topped with torch ginger. Mains come off an open flame: kangaroo chops with maitake, coral trout with a properly crisped skin, and a Blackmore Wagyu number on a bun that reads as a knowing play on the great Australian steak sandwich. The dessert that lingers is the Banksia Pop, served on a real banksia branch, the kind of flourish that could be a gimmick and instead lands as the natural close of a meal built on the country's own vocabulary. 

Tatler Tip

The wine list is 70 per cent Australian, and the pairing might open with a barrel-aged mandarin saison Allen brewed with local legends La Sirène.