The best Canberra restaurants to visit in 2026

There aren’t many better places to be on a cold Canberra night than warming your hands in front of the fireplace at Bar Rochford. Once those hands are suitably toasty, get a glass into them, stat: something left-of-field from Europe maybe, or a low-intervention local. To the food: start with wine-friendly snacks – a mosaic of beef carpaccio with Jerusalem artichoke and confit egg, perhaps, or a round of oysters with jalapeño vinaigrette. Then get into a comfortingly old-school chicken ballotine with polenta, or nubbins of orecchiette with pumpkin and ricotta. Add polished concrete flooring, heritage archways and well-chosen tunes and you have somewhere to sit out winter.

Third-culture cooking is the most exciting way to eat in 2026 – not only in Australia but globally. Diaspora runs through every dish at 22-seat restaurant and wine bar Mínima, one of Canberra’s most intriguing openings in years. Maybe it’s a plate of char siu pork sausage with winter pickle salad and a fermented bean curd glaze, which could be described as Canberran Cantonese. Sweet and sour pulled short rib reads as Chinese, but squish it into a burger and you have a Western-style sloppy Joe. The drinks follow the same logic: small-scale, off-kilter wines and sake. This kind of food is borderless – and brilliant.

Everything about Such and Such, the big-hearted, casual sibling to fine-diner Pilot, feels reassuringly, warmly human. The colour-blocked décor. The wholly unique dishes – where else are you eating pork belly with taco spice and wombok, or a green salad lifted out of the ordinary with roasted cashews and fermented celery? Even the website makes you feel at home, offering suggestions of what to do and where to stay in Canberra, and urging you to pick up the phone for a chat if you can’t find a booking time that suits. AI could never.

How the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide works

From fine-diners to bistros, trattorias, omakase counters, regional gems and many more, every restaurant featured in the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide should be considered the best of its kind. To earn a place, a restaurant must excel from welcome to farewell, with service, design, originality, consistency and atmosphere all carefully considered. But the most crucial area of excellence is always the food.

The Guide is divided by states, with an individual winner leading each. All remaining entries are listed alphabetically. All restaurants reviewed were visited anonymously and paid for in full.

This year, we consulted our state editors (Alexandra Carlton, Alix Davis, Elliot Baker, Katie Spain, Max Veenhuyzen and Michael Harden), the Gourmet Traveller editorial team including David Meagher, Ceri David and Georgia Condon, and trusted friends of Gourmet Traveller.

More of the best restaurants in Canberra

This architectural icon housed atop Red Hill serves a polished, Italian-ish menu with dishes cooked over flames in the open kitchen. On ground level, you’ll find more casual fare via Lunetta Trattoria, while upstairs, fine-dining dazzles. Pasta is a standout — as is the knockout view.

Located at the back of a suburban shopping strip, this quietly brilliant 24-seat fine-diner surprises and delights. Owners Dash Rumble and Ross McQuinn, together with chef Mal Hanslow, serve up a playful tasting menu and an all-Australian drinks list.