La Vètta at Marnong Estate holds its hat in The Age Good Food Guide 2027, for a second year running. Head chef Ashleigh Cameron-Smith now leads the kitchen that keeps it.
The road to La Vètta runs north out of Melbourne, past the airport and the last of the new housing estates, and then it climbs. By the top of Marnong Estate in Mickleham, the city has shrunk to a line on the horizon. Camels graze in the paddock below the lawn. Peacocks wander where they like.
The restaurant sits at the summit. Its name means exactly that. The windows face the rolling hills and the ranges beyond. At sunset the valley turns gold. Marnong calls it Melbourne’s best sunset. From La Vètta, it is hard to argue. That is the hour to book.
La Vètta holds one hat in The Age Good Food Guide 2027, with a score of 15 out of 20. It was first hatted in the Good Food Guide 2026. This is the second year running.
Holding a hat is hard anywhere. It is harder on a working farm 35 minutes from the CBD, where every guest has to decide to make the drive.
For the Good Food Guide 2027, reviewers booked anonymously, and the guide paid for its own meals. A restaurant cannot buy its way in, and it cannot charm its way through a reassessment.
“A hat can be luck once. Twice, it’s a standard.”
Jonny Trow, general manager, Marnong Estate
The kitchen behind the Good Food Guide 2027 hat
The Good Food Guide 2027 praised cooking that is Italian at its root and willing to wander.
That kitchen is now led by Ashleigh Cameron-Smith, named head chef in August. It is her first head chef role. She works alongside Marnong’s executive chef, Lucio Russo. Her spring menu keeps what earned the hat — pasta made by hand, cooking over fire — and moves it forward.
Her name is on the menu. Under “From the Josper” sits Head Chef Ashleigh’s Hand-Selected Cut: a piece she chooses herself each day, grilled over charcoal and served with salsa verde and lemon. It changes with what comes through the door, so the only way to know what it is tonight is to ask.
The Josper is the centre of her kitchen, fed with red gum, ironbark or jarrah, each wood burning differently and leaving its own trace on the meat. A Cape Grim wagyu eye fillet comes out of it with cavolo nero, salsa alla pizzaiola and horseradish jus. Skewers go over Japanese white coal.
The details run local. Pasta is made in house, hand-folded or bronze-extruded. The eggs come from Christian’s Lucky Hens, on the estate. The thyme on the focaccia is picked from the estate garden. The savoiardi in the tiramisu are baked in Thomastown, down the road.
“Respect the ingredient, cook with purpose and let the food, wine and place tell the story.”
La Vètta spring menu
The wine list keeps the same two loyalties, local and Italian. Marnong’s own award-winning wines are grown on the estate, in the Sunbury region, and they lean Italian too: Fiano, Sangiovese, Montepulciano, a Ripasso served chilled, and Prosecco for the first glass of the evening. The single-vineyard pinots, Heart and Weatherstone, are worth asking about.
Beside them sit Italy’s heavyweights: Barolo and Barbaresco from Piedmont, Etna Rosso from Sicily, Brunello from Montalcino. A glass from the vines outside the window can share a table with one from the Langhe.
Fine dining in Melbourne’s north
Melbourne has always eaten in its inner suburbs. Mickleham is not on most diners’ map. It sits in the City of Hume, the fast-growing northern corridor where new estates arrive faster than restaurants do.
That makes a Good Food Guide 2027 hat here an unusual thing: a destination that asks for a drive and pays it back with a view. The room manages both registers. A couple can take a window table for two. A family can fill a long table for a birthday. Nobody needs to whisper.
A hat is never only about the plate. Restaurant manager Chiara and her front-of-house team carry the other half: the welcome, the wine, the pacing of a long lunch as the light moves across the valley.
By the time the tiramisu arrives, the light has gone from the hills. The drive home is the only reason to leave.
Congratulations to Ashleigh, Lucio, Chiara and the whole La Vètta team: the kitchen, the floor and everyone behind the scenes. A Good Food Guide 2027 hat is earned one service at a time, and this one is yours. — Marnong Estate