Good Food hat 15 / 20 How we score Italian $$$ $ I’m at a winery restaurant 15 minutes north of Melbourne Airport and a camel is watching me have lunch. The air is scented with woodsmoke and the sounds are happy ones: glasses clinking, laughter tinkling. I have a glass of zippy sparkling wine and the 1pm Airbus to Singapore pushes past painterly clouds.
We’re at La Vetta, the hilltop, 110-seat restaurant at Marnong Estate, a 485-hectare cattle farm and visitor destination on Melbourne’s northern fringe. Lunch is a delight, an accomplished meal overseen by chef Greg Feck, who’s been cooking Italian food in Melbourne for 30 years. As good as it is, I’m not sure my next trip here will be to the restaurant.
Maybe I’ll return for the monthly petting zoo, where that camel and her friends are saddled up for rides and there’s hand-feeding of emus, goats and bunnies. Perhaps I’ll be invited to a wedding in the woolshed or I’ll find a designated driver to chauffeur me to the cellar door for wine tasting followed by a cheese platter on the lawn. I might book into one of the swish cabins with views to the Macedon Ranges, or sink into a suite in the original bluestone homestead, parts of which date back to the 1840s.
I could bring the kids to the kiosk for panini or invite the grandparents to the casual, all-day Cucina 3064 for pizza and parma. There are multiple reasons to point yourself towards one of the most surprising destinations in Melbourne. Marnong Estate owner .