Cheapest Ways to Eat in Australia: How to Feed Yourself Well on a Backpacker Budget
Australia has a reputation for being expensive, and when it comes to restaurants and cafés that reputation is largely deserved — a sit-down dinner in a city restaurant will cost you $25–$45 AUD per person before drinks. But the story is completely different if you know where to actually look. Australia also has excellent supermarkets stocked with high-quality produce, an extraordinary range of affordable Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants in every major city, and a culture of outdoor eating and barbecuing that makes cooking and eating socially genuinely enjoyable. Backpackers who feed themselves well on a budget in Australia are not going without — they are just shopping and eating in the right places.
📋 TL;DR – Cheapest Ways to Eat in Australia
- ✅ Aldi and IGA are your best friends: Aldi in particular offers dramatically cheaper groceries than Coles or Woolworths — typically 30–40% cheaper on basics like bread, eggs, pasta, rice, and fruit.
- 🍜 Asian food courts and restaurants are Australia’s best cheap dining: Every major Australian city has Asian food precincts where $10–$14 AUD buys a full meal that rivals any restaurant.
- 🧑🍳 Cooking in hostel kitchens cuts your food budget in half: Most Australian hostels have well-equipped communal kitchens — use them.
- 🥩 Supermarket markdowns happen twice daily: Meat and fresh produce get reduced in the morning (unsold from the previous day) and again late afternoon (close to expiry). Hit the supermarket at these times.
- 🌮 Markets are cheap and excellent: Farmers markets, Sunday markets, and night markets across Australia sell prepared food for $6–$12 per dish, often far better quality than restaurants at half the price.
🛒 Supermarket strategy
🛍️ Choose the right supermarket
Australia’s main supermarket chains are Woolworths, Coles, and Aldi. Woolworths and Coles are broadly equivalent in price and slightly premium. Aldi is significantly cheaper for basics and produces its own-brand products that are genuinely good quality. If you are near an Aldi, shop there for staples — rice, pasta, eggs, bread, cheese, butter, fruit, vegetables, and tinned goods — and you will spend dramatically less than at the big two. IGA is an independent chain whose pricing varies by store but is often competitive on fresh produce and has longer opening hours in regional areas.
⏰ Time your visits for markdowns
Both Coles and Woolworths mark down meat, bakery items, deli goods, and fresh produce at two points in the day: in the morning (yesterday’s items that did not sell overnight) and in the late afternoon or early evening (items close to their use-by date). The yellow “reduced to clear” stickers typically offer 30–50% off. Chicken breasts, pork chops, salmon fillets, and fresh pasta regularly appear in the markdown section at prices that make them the cheapest protein available. Whole rotisserie chickens that did not sell before closing go into the markdown section for $5–$7 AUD — buy one and it feeds two people for dinner and provides lunch the next day in sandwiches.
🍜 Cheap restaurant options
🥢 Asian food courts and restaurants
Australian cities have large and well-established Asian communities, and the food that has come with them represents the best value eating in the country by a significant margin. Vietnamese pho and banh mi, Chinese dumplings and roast duck, Japanese ramen and donburi, Thai pad Thai and green curry, Korean bibimbap and fried chicken — all of these are available in dedicated Asian food precincts in every Australian capital city for $10–$16 AUD per dish, in generous portions. Sydney’s Chinatown, Melbourne’s Victoria Street in Richmond, Cabramatta, and the various Asian precincts in Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide all offer excellent eating for a fraction of what a comparable mainstream restaurant charges.
🫓 Bakeries and sandwich shops
Australian bakeries (the traditional suburban type, not the artisan cafés) sell meat pies, sausage rolls, pasties, and sandwiches for $4–$7 AUD. A pie and a sausage roll constitutes a filling lunch for $8 — not thrilling but perfectly functional. Vietnamese bakeries (Bánh mì shops) are even better value: a fully-loaded bánh mì roll costs $6–$9 and is one of the great value meals available anywhere in Australia.
🍕 Pizza and pasta
Every Australian suburb has at least one local pizza shop offering takeaway pizzas for $8–$15 each. These are typically large enough to constitute a full meal for one or a shared meal for two. Italian restaurant lunch specials in cities often offer pasta dishes for $12–$16 AUD — substantially cheaper than their dinner menus. Pasta is also one of the cheapest and most satisfying meals to cook in a hostel kitchen: spaghetti bolognese, pasta arrabiata, and carbonara all cost $3–$5 AUD per person in ingredient costs.
🧑🍳 Cooking in hostel kitchens
Most Australian backpacker hostels have communal kitchens equipped with gas or electric cooktops, ovens, microwaves, pots, pans, plates, and cutlery. Using the kitchen is free and saves you $15–$25 AUD every time you cook rather than eating out. The challenge is that you are usually travelling without your own groceries, which means either buying fresh for each meal or joining the hostel’s communal food shelf — an informal institution in Australian hostels where travellers leave behind whatever food they are not taking with them. Check the communal shelf when you arrive: it often contains olive oil, spices, rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes, and other staples donated by departing travellers.
The social dimension of hostel cooking is also worth noting. Cooking with other backpackers — pooling ingredients, sharing a meal, and eating together on the terrace — is one of the most reliably enjoyable experiences of hostel life. It is cheaper than eating out, more communal, and produces some of the best conversations and friendships of the trip.
🌿 Free food options
- 🍌 Hostel free food bins: The communal shelf mentioned above — always worth checking on arrival.
- 🥑 Hostel breakfasts: Some hostels include basic breakfast (cereal, toast, tea, coffee) in the nightly rate. Factor this in when comparing hostel prices — a $5 higher nightly rate that includes breakfast is usually a net saving.
- 🍻 Happy hour food deals: Many Australian pubs offer free or very cheap bar snacks during happy hour ($1–$2 sliders, free chips). This is not a nutritionally complete strategy but works as a pre-dinner supplement.
- 🎪 Market samples: Farmers markets are generous with samples — cheese, bread, fruit, preserves. A lap of a good market on a Saturday morning constitutes a reasonable free breakfast if you commit to the bit.
💰 Realistic daily food budgets
If you cook all your own meals from supermarket ingredients, you can eat well in Australia for $15–$20 AUD per day — breakfast of eggs and toast, a packed lunch from leftovers, and a cooked dinner. If you mix cooking with occasional cheap restaurant meals (one Asian restaurant dinner per day, lunch cooked), budget $25–$35 AUD per day. If you eat out for every meal but make smart choices (bakery breakfast, Asian lunch, shared pizza dinner), $40–$55 AUD per day is achievable. Full sit-down restaurant eating at every meal will cost $70–$100 AUD per day in a city — unsustainable on a backpacker budget for any length of time.
The key insight is that eating cheaply in Australia does not mean eating badly. The quality of ingredients at Australian supermarkets is genuinely high, the Asian restaurant scene provides world-class food at prices that seem impossibly low by European standards, and cooking together in hostel kitchens produces meals that are as enjoyable as anything on the restaurant strip.
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