La Vètta at Marnong Estate has earned its first hat, in The Age Good Food Guide 2026, with a score of 15 out of 20. The kitchen behind it is led by executive chef Greg Feck and head chef Marc Vadeboncoeur.

The critic came in for lunch like any other guest, and paid like one. Nobody in the room knew. The Age’s reviewers book under other names and settle their own bills, and a restaurant learns it has been judged only when the words appear in print.

For La Vètta, those words appeared on 25 October 2024. The Age called it “one of Melbourne’s most surprising destinations” and scored it 15 out of 20, the mark for a hat. A year later, in October 2025, The Age Good Food Guide 2026 put that hat in print beside the restaurant’s name for the first time.

Hats tend to gather in the inner city. In the Good Food Guide 2026, this one went to a 110-seat dining room on a 485-hectare cattle farm, 15 minutes north of Melbourne Airport.

What the critic ate

The meal that earned the Good Food Guide 2026 hat was not fussy. It leaned, in the critic’s words, “hard into steak and pasta”, and most plates passed over a wood grill or through a domed wood-fired oven on their way to the table.

Mortadella came threaded onto skewers and cooked over charcoal until the fat ran. Paccheri, extruded in house, arrived in a buttery bisque made from the shells of Moreton Bay bugs, and it was the pasta, not the shellfish, that won the critic over. Carrots were blistered in the oven and finished with seeds and herb oil. The review said they had been “turned into heroes”.

The go-to dish was wagyu flank steak, cooked as asked and seasoned well. “There’s confidence in simplicity,” the critic wrote. Dessert was tiramisu, made with eggs from the estate’s own hens and scooped from a large bowl at the table.

The chefs behind the Good Food Guide 2026 hat

Executive chef Greg Feck had been cooking Italian food in Melbourne for 30 years before he came up the hill. A New Zealander, he had cooked at Richmond Hill Cafe & Larder, at the St Kilda fine diner Sapore, and at two Hawthorn rooms, Crabapple Kitchen and the Venetian bar Vaporetto.

At La Vètta he works alongside head chef Marc Vadeboncoeur. Together they have built a menu that is Italian at heart and plain-spoken in style, and they cook it at scale: a full dining room at lunch, with a cellar door, a café and a woolshed of wedding guests on the same estate.

They also cook for the neighbourhood. The review noted that most of the meat dishes are halal, and that some Italian recipes have been adjusted to suit, with ragù made without wine. The crowd in the room, the critic observed, looks like the northern suburbs around it.

Owner Dino Strano grew up in those suburbs. He bought the property in 2016 as a hobby farm, and told The Age the decision to open it to the public came almost immediately.

“The day after, I looked at the view and said, ‘We have to share it.’”

Dino Strano, owner, Marnong Estate, to The Age

A room made for the view

The dining room is long and open. Leather banquettes run down both sides, terracotta pendants hang from a slatted timber ceiling, and the far wall is glass, framing farmland that runs to the horizon. The critic found the floor staff “well-schooled” and “genuinely proud of their work”.

Wine follows the same logic as the food. The review’s advice was to drink what grows on the estate, and to look to the Italian varieties on the list. It named pinot grigio, fiano and montepulciano as natural partners for the menu.

Why a hat in Mickleham matters

The Good Food Guide has long been a map of where Melbourne eats, and for most of its history that map has stopped short of the Ring Road. Mickleham sits in the City of Hume, one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Victoria, where new housing estates have arrived faster than places to celebrate in them.

A hat in the Good Food Guide 2026 changes that. It tells diners in Fitzroy and South Yarra that the drive is worth making. It tells families in Craigieburn, Greenvale and Sunbury that a special night out no longer means a trip into town.

The bill, by the critic’s reckoning, came to about $250 for two before drinks. The view comes free.

Congratulations to executive chef Greg Feck, head chef Marc Vadeboncoeur and the whole La Vètta team, in the kitchen and on the floor, on a first hat in the Good Food Guide 2026.Marnong Estate