Honda ZR-V-Approved: The Honda Team's Favourite Spots
The Honda team's own picks across the country — the spots they actually go back to, and would take you themselves.
Every guide in our A to Z with Honda ZR-V series came out of months of research and deliberation, but this last one skips the research — it's the Honda team naming the places they personally keep returning to on their own time. A sandstone grotto with a Neptune statue watching over the tables. A hundred-year-old milk bar with its original tiles rediscovered under a layer of concrete during the reno. Gelato made to an actual Italian recipe, not just an Italian name.
Melbourne's Baker Bleu started as a tiny Elsternwick shopfront in 2016 and now supplies bread to some of the city's best restaurants, though the queue for its own sourdough loaves hasn't gotten any shorter. In Brisbane, Marlowe occupies a 1938 Art Deco apartment block on Fish Lane, spread across two floors and nine rooms — four of them enclosed sunrooms — with a menu pulled from vintage Australian cookbooks. Sydney's Club Rose Bay sits on the site of Australia's first international airport, and still reads the Ode of Remembrance aloud every evening at 6pm before its glamorous 1950s record bar gets going. And a business that could feature on every city in this list, Lune Croissanterie's Kate Reid left a job with the Williams Formula 1 team to design a climate-controlled glass cube for proofing croissants — the same technical precision the New York Times says produces the finest croissant in the world. Presented by Honda ZR-V, here are twelve spots the Honda team would take you to themselves.
Read other guides in our A to Z with Honda ZR-V series:
After-Work Drink Spots to Meet Your Friends and Wind Down the Day
Neighbourhood Restaurants the Locals Try Hard to Keep Secret
X-Factor Venues Made to Impress Even the Most Jaded Out-of-Towners
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CafeBaker Bleu
121 Hawthorn Road, Caulfield North
What started as a single Elsternwick storefront has become Melbourne’s most sought-after bakery, its ficelle, challah and spiced apple crostata now supplying the city’s best restaurants.
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CafeLune Croissanterie
119 Rose Street, Fitzroy
Founder Kate Reid built a temperature-controlled glass studio just to laminate dough properly, and the result is a twice-baked croissant and cruffin so precise they’ve been called the best in the world.
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RestaurantJulietta
220 Toorak Road, South Yarra
From the team behind Mamasita, this South Yarra trattoria channels a 1960s Italian dining room for handmade pasta, its cacio e pepe finished with green peppercorns instead of the usual black.
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CafePiccolina Gelateria Hawthorn
731 Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn
Every flavour here is made from scratch using traditional methods, and the store’s stainless-steel fit-out pays homage to the pozzetti cases gelato was always meant to be scooped from.
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RestaurantArre
182-184 Australia Street, Newtown
Chef Roy McVeigh brings a resume built at Attica, Bennelong and Quay to this Newtown Mexican spot, turning out an 18-hour Berkshire pork al pastor and Murray River cod.
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BarClub Rose Bay
1 Vickery Avenue, Rose Bay
This Rose Bay RSL has had its first refurb since 1979 ,adding full-size pickleball and basketball courts, a dog-friendly beer garden and a 1950s jet-age cocktail bar.
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RestaurantNeptune's Grotto
Bridge Street, Sydney
Carved into the sandstone beneath sister restaurant Clam Bar, this subterranean grotto centres on a statue of Neptune himself, serving handmade Northern Italian pasta by candlelight.
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BarBar Francine
29 Vulture Street, West End
Set inside a weatherboard cottage that once served as the neighbourhood milk bar, Bar Francine pairs a fluid European menu with an all-Australian wine list favouring women-led wineries.
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RestaurantCentral
340 Queen Street, Brisbane City
Tucked 80 seats deep beneath Piccadilly Arcade on the site of the old Primitif Cafe, Central serves proper Hong Kong dim sum in a subterranean room that nods to the building’s 1950s jazz-club past.
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RestaurantMarlowe Restaurant
105 Melbourne Street, South Brisbane
Braised duck pie and coral trout wellington headline the menu at Marlowe, set inside the art deco Merivale Flats on Fish Lane, a 1938 building whose period details still frame the dining room.
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This guide was produced in partnership with Honda ZR-V. To learn more about the ultimate car for urban discovery, click here.