Best restaurants in Hobart: where to eat in Tasmania’s food capital
Hobart has quietly become one of the best cities in Australia to eat in. It doesn’t shout about it the way Melbourne does, and it doesn’t have Sydney’s glamour or Brisbane’s sunshine to attract attention. What it has is something rarer: an extraordinary local food culture built on some of the best produce in the world, served in restaurants that care deeply about what they’re doing and don’t feel the need to impress anyone with fuss.
The ingredients here are exceptional. The seafood comes from some of the cleanest, coldest water in the southern hemisphere — abalone, salmon, flathead, rock lobster, oysters. The beef and lamb graze on lush green pastures in a climate that barely stresses the animals. The vegetables and fruit grow slowly and sweetly in the cool air. And a generation of chefs has arrived in Tasmania and decided that this extraordinary larder deserves restaurants worthy of it.
I’ve eaten my way around Hobart over many visits, and these are the restaurants I return to, recommend to everyone who asks, and think about between visits.
📋 TL;DR – Best restaurants in Hobart
- 🦞 Franklin is Hobart’s best restaurant and one of the best in Australia — a wood-fired kitchen using extraordinary Tasmanian produce.
- 🐟 Templo is excellent for creative small plates with outstanding wine; book well in advance.
- 🦪 Maldini on the waterfront is the place for seafood in a beautiful, uncomplicated setting.
- ☕ Pilgrim Coffee is the best coffee in Hobart — full stop.
- 📅 Book ahead — Hobart’s best restaurants are small and fill quickly, especially on weekends.
- 🌊 Eat oysters at the Taste of Tasmania festival if you visit in December–January — an extraordinary food event on the waterfront.
🔥 Franklin — Hobart’s finest
Franklin, on Argyle Street near the waterfront, is the restaurant that established Hobart as a serious food city on the national stage — and it remains the best reason to plan a meal here. Chef David Moyle (and the talented team that has evolved the kitchen over the years) built a restaurant around a wood-fired hearth, and everything — vegetables, fish, meat — passes through the fire before it reaches your plate. The results are extraordinary: complex flavours from simple techniques, produce so good it needs almost nothing done to it, and a menu that changes with what’s available and in season.
The dining room is beautiful in a spare, considered way: raw timber, exposed brick, the heat and light of the kitchen visible from every table. The wine list is exceptional, leaning heavily on natural and biodynamic producers from Tasmania and further afield. Bookings are essential and competition for weekend tables is fierce — book as far in advance as possible. Franklin represents everything that’s good about Hobart’s food culture: serious, unpretentious, produce-led and genuinely delicious.
🍷 Templo — natural wine and creative small plates
Templo is the kind of restaurant that becomes someone’s absolute favourite the first time they eat there — small, intimate, run with obvious care, and serving some of the most interesting food in Hobart. The menu changes regularly and is built around small plates designed for sharing: think salt-baked celeriac with cultured cream, or fried cuttlefish with smoked tomato, or whole fish baked in the wood oven. The cooking is confident and creative without ever being showy.
The wine list at Templo is exceptional — one of the best curated lists of natural wine in Tasmania, with a particular strength in Tasmanian producers and interesting imports from France, Italy and beyond. The room seats perhaps 30 people, which gives every dinner a gathering-in-someone’s-home quality that’s increasingly rare in restaurant dining. Book well in advance — this is one of the hardest reservations to get in Hobart, and deservedly so.
🦪 Maldini — waterfront seafood done beautifully
Maldini, on Castray Esplanade overlooking Constitution Dock, has been one of Hobart’s best seafood restaurants for years — and it has earned its reputation through consistent quality and a genuine respect for the extraordinary seafood available from Tasmanian waters. The setting is excellent: tables looking out over the dock where the fishing boats tie up, the water visible through the windows, the kind of unhurried atmosphere that the best waterfront restaurants manage without trying.
The menu is built around what’s fresh and local: Tasmanian rock lobster when it’s in season, Bruny Island oysters, pan-fried flathead, Atlantic salmon from the Huon Valley. The cooking is classic rather than avant-garde — the point is the quality of the ingredients, not the complexity of what’s done to them. This is a restaurant for a long lunch over excellent wine, watching the boats and the light on the water. It represents Hobart food at its most relaxed and most honest.
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🌿 Agrarian Kitchen Eatery — farm to table at its purest
The Agrarian Kitchen Eatery in New Norfolk, 40 minutes from Hobart, is worth the drive. The restaurant is attached to a biodynamic farm in the Derwent Valley, and virtually everything on the plate — the vegetables, the eggs, the herbs, the honey — is grown and raised on the property or sourced from similarly committed local producers. The result is food that tastes like food is supposed to taste: vivid, clean, deeply flavoured, with a directness that comes from absolute freshness.
Pair this with Best Fine Dining Restaurants Australia to round out your trip.
The dining room occupies the beautifully restored Old Mental Hospital buildings in New Norfolk — a setting that sounds confronting but is actually extraordinarily beautiful: high ceilings, stone walls, and gardens visible through tall windows. The tasting menu (available for lunch and dinner) is exceptional value given the quality of the produce and the cooking. The cooking school next door is also excellent for those who want to learn from the farm’s producers directly.
🐟 Fico — Italian heart, Tasmanian soul
Fico on Murray Street is Hobart’s best Italian restaurant — though “Italian” undersells what this place does. The kitchen takes the techniques and spirit of Italian cooking and applies them to Tasmanian ingredients: local cuttlefish becomes the base for a beautiful ink-black pasta, Huon Valley salmon gets the curing and smoking treatment that would be applied to Italian guanciale, and the vegetables arrive from small producers in the Huon and Derwent valleys.
The pasta is made in-house and is outstanding. The wine list has excellent Italian producers alongside an impressive selection of Tasmanian wines. The service is warm and knowledgeable without being stiff. Fico is a restaurant that delivers a genuinely lovely evening — good food, good wine, a beautiful room — without any of the pretension that sometimes accompanies this level of cooking. Book ahead for weekend tables.
🍳 Pilgrim Coffee — the best breakfast in Hobart
No Hobart food guide is complete without Pilgrim Coffee, the small café on Murray Street that has been making some of the best coffee in Tasmania for years. The coffee here is exceptional — sourced carefully, roasted with precision, and made by baristas who know what they’re doing. The breakfast and brunch menu is excellent too: well-executed classics using good local produce, served in a cosy, unpretentious space that fills quickly on weekend mornings.
Pilgrim is the kind of coffee shop that a city reveals when it has truly built a food culture — not a flashy destination but a neighbourhood institution that regulars rely on and visitors immediately understand why. Arrive before 9am on weekends to secure a table. Take your coffee to the nearby waterfront if you can’t get a seat — it tastes just as good in the open air with the harbour in front of you.
🦞 The Taste of Tasmania — eat your way around the waterfront
If your Hobart visit falls between late December and early January, the Taste of Tasmania festival is an unmissable experience. Held on the Hobart waterfront over about a week spanning New Year’s Eve, this outdoor food and beverage festival brings together the best of Tasmanian produce — oysters from Bruny Island, salmon from the Huon, cheeses from the Coal River Valley, whisky from the island’s extraordinary distilleries, beer from Cascade and craft producers, wine from every Tasmanian region — and serves it in a beautiful outdoor setting with the harbour as backdrop.
The festival coincides with the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race finish, when the waterfront is alive with the racing fleet and the crews of the yachts that have survived the notorious Bass Strait crossing. The combination of extraordinary food, world-class sailing, the New Year’s Eve fireworks over the Derwent, and the warm December light makes this one of the great summer events in Australia. Plan your visit to coincide with it if you possibly can.
🌊 Ethos Eat Drink — creative vegetable-forward cooking
Ethos Eat Drink on Elizabeth Street is Hobart’s best option for vegetable-forward cooking — which is saying something in a city whose food scene has traditionally been anchored in seafood and meat. The restaurant takes Tasmanian vegetables, grains and dairy seriously and turns them into dishes of genuine creativity and satisfaction. This is not vegetarian cooking in a self-denying sense; it’s cooking that treats plants as the main event and produces results that meat-eaters find just as satisfying as herbivores.
The wine list is excellent — strong in Tasmanian producers, with interesting natural wine imports. The service has a warmth and engagement that makes Ethos feel like eating in someone’s home rather than in a restaurant. The room is small and fills quickly; book ahead for Thursday through Saturday. Ethos is a good option for groups with mixed dietary requirements, as the menu is creative enough to satisfy those who would normally prefer meat while genuinely delighting the vegetable-inclined.
🏛️ MONA and its restaurants — art and food together
The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) — Australia’s most extraordinary private museum, housed in an underground complex carved into a sandstone cliff 12 kilometres from Hobart’s CBD — has its own food and beverage offering that deserves mention. The Source Restaurant in the museum is excellent: a beautifully designed space with views over the Derwent and a menu that draws on Tasmanian produce with the same seriousness and creativity the museum brings to its art collection.
MONA is also the site of MONA FOMA (Festival of Music and Art) in January and DARK MOFO in June — two extraordinary annual events that transform the museum and the city around it. During DARK MOFO, the food and wine events attached to the festival are exceptional, and the combination of extraordinary art, live performance, and very good eating makes a Hobart visit during this period one of the most culturally rich experiences in Australia. Ferry from Hobart’s Brooke Street Pier to MONA takes about 25 minutes and is a beautiful trip up the Derwent.
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🗺️ Tips for eating in Hobart
Hobart’s best restaurants are small — most seat between 20 and 50 people — which means bookings are essential, particularly for Friday and Saturday evenings. The best approach is to book before you arrive: most Hobart restaurants use the Resy or OpenTable booking systems, and reservations open four to eight weeks in advance. For the most in-demand places (Franklin, Templo), book as soon as reservations open.
The Salamanca Place area — the historic sandstone warehouse precinct on the waterfront — has a concentration of restaurants, cafés and bars, and the Saturday Salamanca Market (held weekly) is excellent for breakfast, coffee and browsing. The best produce comes from the market itself: local honey, cheese, smoked salmon, jams and pickles from small Tasmanian producers. Eating at the market on a Saturday morning, then exploring the galleries and shops in the afternoon, is one of the great low-key Hobart experiences. The waterfront area around Constitution Dock and Mures Fish House (for casual fish and chips straight off the boats) rounds out the food landscape of a city that punches well, well above its weight.
Exploring Australia’s food and wine scene, read our guides to luxury lodges Tasmania, best wineries Margaret river, the best food in Cairns, the best food in Melbourne, eco lodges in Tasmania, and things to do in Hobart.
