Melbourne doesn’t have a brilliant track record with restaurants in cultural institutions. Hero, at Fed Square’s ACMI, bucks that trend emphatically.
Melbourne doesn’t have a brilliant track record with restaurants in cultural institutions. Hero, at Fed Square’s ACMI, bucks that trend emphatically. It’s a Karen Martini joint for starters, so you get a menu of excellent, shareable, mostly Italian comfort food. Occasionally, it might stray over the border to France via a sumptuous chicken-liver parfait with amber-coloured verjuice jelly or a steak frites with “Café de Hero” butter. Otherwise the menu involves some hard decisions: mussels in smoked butter and fermented chilli served with ridiculously crisp potato cakes or vitello tonnato that’s textured with fried artichokes and capers? Order both. Philippa Sibley is in the kitchen, too, so dessert is a no-brainer, particularly if there are tarts: sublime lemon, perhaps, or a knee-weakening date and mascarpone number. The wine list is as tight as the cocktails and as sharp as the gorgeously minimalist room. Consider it the dining equivalent of a cinema classic.
This review was made independently for the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide. The guide’s reviewers visit unannounced and pay their way. To learn more about the process, click here.
Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Guide 2023
Our guide gives a yearly snapshot of the best restaurants to eat at right now. The best-rated restaurants, as judged by the reviewers’ first-hand experience, form our national Top 82.
