This week we’re adding Harriot to The Hot List, the definitive guide to Melbourne’s most essential food and drink experiences.
Even in a city filled with Italian restaurants, Tipo 00’s opening in 2014 was a seismic moment that permanently changed Melbourne’s pasta landscape. Was it a flash in the pan? Could its owners, the Conferre Group, do it again?
Yep. Osteria Ilaria, in 2017, was another smash that consolidated the team’s reputation as the standard-setters for Italian in town. In 2022, they turned to pizza, with Figlia, and then delis with Grana in 2025. What part of Italy – or its cuisine – would they turn to next?
Instead, Harriot is the group’s first ever non-Italian venue. And the brief is basically to give head chef James Kelly a great kitchen and the freedom to play around and see what happens.
“We don’t really want to label ourselves as French – but my cooking is a little bit French,” says Kelly. “I had decided that my time in London was up and I got this opportunity, so I moved home.
“It’s been a dream so far.”
Harriot is on the ground floor of the new 555 Collins Street building, a development that’s replaced Enterprise House – one of Melbourne’s more reviled buildings. It was your typical ’70s drab, blah and beige tower. But people really didn’t like Enterprise House because the Federal Coffee Palace, one of Melbourne’s grandest buildings, was demolished to make way for it.
“The Coffee Palace was this beautiful architectural masterpiece,” Kelly says. “Harriot was named after the mother of one of the architects who designed it.”
Completed in 1888, the Federal Coffee Palace was a characteristically Melbourne building – designed by locals – that was also heavily indebted to the styles and techniques in vogue in Europe at the time.
One hundred and thirty-seven years later, where the Coffee Palace once stood, Kelly is pulling off a similar trick. Harriot is either a Melbourne restaurant inspired by Europe or a European restaurant inspired by Melbourne. Maybe it’s both.
“We’re obviously on King Street at the bottom of an office building, but you don’t feel like that when you step in,” says Kelly. “It feels like a beautiful restaurant in Paris – it’s got a really nice vibe.”
Harriot owes its international outlook to Kelly’s experience. The Melbourne chef worked at Embla and its short-lived but much-missed upstairs restaurant Lesa, before moving to London to work at revered Shoreditch restaurant Lyle’s, which closed earlier this year. It was a fixture in the Michelin Guide and the World’s 50 Best list – including during the four years Kelly spent there as senior sous-chef – and was beloved for the understated ways in which it alchemised seasonal local ingredients into refined and elegant dishes.
Now, after two years of percolation, Harriot is open and taking bookings. And Kelly’s first menu takes everything the chef loves about Melbourne, London, Paris and Europe, and rolls them all into one.
Great Ocean duck – aged and prepared in three separate ways – served in duck consommé with mandarin segments and turnips, has been an early star. So have the lamb sweetbreads. They’re pan-fried in a classic French grenobloise sauce, then topped with witlof and pops of finger lime.
The Goulburn River rainbow trout is another eye-catcher. It’s cured in salt and lemon zest, before spending just over 10 seconds in Harriot’s custom Brick Chef wood oven. Then the fillets are topped with charred cabbage and laid atop a puddle of emulsified brined cabbage.
On the smaller side, a pig’s head and parsley terrine, and a beef tartare, also keep Harriot true to its French-adjacent aspirations. Again though – Victoria is the real star. The pigs in terrine come from McIvor Farm in Tooborac. In the tartare, the beef rump is by Sher Wagyu, and the red mizuna on top is by Keilor’s Day’s Walk Farm.
The Tipo 00 team might be cheating on Italy with France, but they can’t shake their pasta habit. “We’re trying to do it in a French way,” says Kelly.
There are two on the menu here: a decadent vego option laden with shaved truffles and comté cream, and spanner crab and gurnard ravioli in a pumpkin bisque.
Kelly’s affection for Europe and Australia is mirrored by sommelier James Howe’s extensive 500-bottle list, which showcases esoteric makers and blockbuster producers from both hemispheres in equal measure.
Hopefully it’s not another 11-year wait for the Conferre team to open its next non-Italian restaurant. Because if Harriot is what we get when they do, we’ll follow them wherever they go.
Harriot
555 Collins Street, Melbourne
0370531036
Hours:
Mon to Thu noon–11pm
Fri 11am–11.30pm
Sat 5pm–11.30pm
@harriot.melbourne