Seven Supremely Delicious Culinary Pop-Ups and Events Happening in Melbourne This Winter

Instead of whipping out your biggest puffer jacket to head to the smokey scenes of the Night Noodle Market, this year you can remain in your trackies for 2021’s At Home edition. The festival, which runs until Wednesday, June 30, is bringing eight Asian eateries together in a pop-up in Fed Square to cook up cult favourites and new eats — that’ll then be delivered to your door.

Think: Hoy Pinoy’s glazed pork belly, Indomie’s mi goreng-crumbed chicken ribs and Puffle’s signature cheeseburger puffle. Orders go through Doordash, where you can mix and match dishes, indulge in a rotating banquet or a date-night feed, and find plenty of deals.

Melbourne’s Good Food Month is back once again to put the city’s food scene back on the table — and showcase its culinary excellence. Thanks to a tasty lineup of events at some of the city’s most renowned restaurants, you won’t go hungry in June. You might want to wear your stretchiest outfits, though.

This festival is always a choose-your-own-adventure affair, so you can go wherever your tastebuds take you — including to wine-fuelled dinners, Japanese-style meals, long lunches and spicy feasts.

Top image: Longrain, Eugene Hyland.

Melbourne’s Fed Square has been transformed into a winter wonderland, with the pop-up Winter Village returning to the Skyline Terrace right across from Flinders Street Station. Running until Sunday, August 29, this frosty event is open every day of the week — and it’s free to enter.

Once you’re there, you can enjoy various eats from a range of food trucks and pop-up bars. There’s also ice skating to help you work up your appetite, a back-drop of twinkly fairy lights so you can get your ‘gram on and snow showers. Plus, you can hide out in the igloo village, which comes with a food and beverage package.

Four Melbourne pubs have turned their respective outdoor spaces into winter havens, complete with private igloos. We’re talking see-through structures decked out with fairy lights and filled with wintery decor and furnishings that can fit up to six pals and booked for two-hour slots.

Find these hideouts at Studley Park Boathouse, Footscray’s Station Hotel, The Auburn Hotel’s beer garden and on the banks of the Yarra at The Wharf Hotel. Plus, each one comes with a different winter-inspired food and beverage package depending on location, such as a meat-heavy set menu, sweet and savoury bites or a three-course feast.

If you’re a fan of the holey treat that is the doughnut, then you can’t miss The Doughnut Festival. Taking place at the Queen Victoria Market on Sunday, July 4, it’ll satisfy all your sugary sweet cravings — and will feature a plethora of doughnuts and sweet treats for you to sink your teeth into, including choc-centred bites, dough balls with hot jam and sugar-coated churros.

There’s even a doughnut-eating competition with a year’s worth of hot jam doughnuts from QVM’s American Doughnut Kitchen up for grabs. All participants need to do is chow down on as many doughnuts as possible in two minutes and then ride that sugar high.

Image: American Doughnut Kitchen at the Queen Victoria Market.

Here to fulfil all your cheese dreams is Mould: A Cheese Festival — a diary-induced festival full of all the gooey, crumbling and stinky good stuff. Taking place over three glorious days from Friday, August 13–Sunday, August 15, the festival is being hosted at Magdalen Laundry – including the outdoor courtyard and lawn area – at Abbotsford Convent.

Attendees can enjoy cheese chats, tastings, demonstrations, featured dishes by local chefs,  and drops of wine, whiskey, sake, beer and cider to help wash down all the bites of brie. Ticket-holders will also walk away from a wine glass to take home and remember the day by.

With the return of the coldest season comes the return of the beloved Winter Night Market at Queen Victoria Markets, made even more exciting after the festival had to sit out 2020. Just when it’ll kick off hasn’t been revealed after Melbourne’s latest lockdown, but the markets will boast plenty to fill your belly and warm you up from the inside out.

Think: smokey barbecue, juicy dumplings, flavourful curries, melted cheesy pasta and indulgent desserts. There’ll be plenty to wash it down with too, with mulled wine, cocktails and hot chocolates being served. Plus, as you eat and drink, you’ll be spoiled by live music, snow and plenty of goodies to buy.