The Best New Experiences in Melbourne This Week
This post is presented by the All New Toyota Corolla Sedan.
The best urban adventures are not only beautiful, stimulating and stacks of fun; they're fresh. They put you ahead of the curve. They make you one of the testers and connoisseurs. And they probably give you the Instagram coup of the day.
There's plenty of fun to be had in this city each week, but there's only a small handful of these intrepid moments. We've partnered with Toyota to find the very best shiny-new experiences in Melbourne. Presented by the All New Toyota Corolla Sedan, these are our picks to put you on the road to a life of goodtimes. Now your only challenge is getting to them all.
Eat: The Tippler & Co
Tucked into a small but well-designed space in East Melbourne, this new bar/restaurant boasts a clean, wood-based aesthetic, and a detail-oriented selection of food and drink that somehow feels both innovative and unpretentious all at once. Instead of a formal dining experience, staff on the floor offer relaxed table service to anyone who so desires and will cheerfully run through the short menu with you. What could at first be overlooked as a small bar menu is in fact a nuanced and varied offering of ornate dishes with both vegan and gluten free options. Our top pick is the beef short rib. Served with sesame spinach, apple and daikon slaw, and edamame (S$22, L$26), the meat in this dish was so tender it just fell off the bone. What more could you want?
58 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne
Drink: Nieuw Amsterdam
Nieuw Amsterdam is a sophisticated new late-night bar and restaurant full of natural light, dark wood, exposed bricks and an air of class without any of the pretense. Operating over two levels — a light filled restaurant upstairs and a dimly lit bar downstairs, perfect for those late night drinks — this venue is set to become a new favourite. The cocktail menu in particular is vast and inviting, full of inventive twists on the classics and some unusual and tasty original concoctions. The menu is separated into categories such as sweet and sour, stiff, spritz'd (all sparkling) and an entire section featuring drink formulas from some of the best bartenders and bars around the city, including The Alchemist and Polly. There is also an impressive collection of 12 local and imported beers on tap and some well-curated bottled ciders and beer.
106–112 Hardware Street, Melbourne
See: New14
Each year the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art offers up some of the country's brightest emerging talent on a platter, commissioning a series of original work that captures the diversity of contemporary practice. Now that ACCA have given such an enormous amount of support to these young artists we get to swoop in and reap all the benefits with a fantastic free showing of all their work. For the exhibition, Danae Valenza is creating a colour organ out of a grand piano and coloured lights, with accompanying photographic 'portraits' of the performances played on it, while Kenny Pittock will showcase a large number of drawings and videos of Melbourne passengers in transit. Get along and spot yourself looking bored on the 112 tram.
March 15 to May 18, ACCA, 111 Sturt Street, Melbourne
Do: Festival of Live Art
Good things are coming in big packages these days. White Night devoured the CBD whole last month, the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is right around the corner, and in the meantime we've been offered up the very first Festival of Live Art — a behemoth of a thing bustling with new and exciting work that closes the increasingly ambiguous gap between art and theatre. In a joint venture between Arts House, Theatre Works and Footscray Community Arts Centre, the festival will take place at multiple venues over the two-week period, and better yet: most events are free. Take a look at the program and plan your full experience, or drift in and out of our top ten picks.
March 14-30, all around Melbourne
