Following a big sweep at Australia’s major landscape architecture awards, Melbourne has done it again. The city that practically wrote the rulebook on good taste – both in food and design – has swept the 2025 Eat Drink Design Awards, taking home four of the country’s top gongs. From a sleek boutique hotel in the CBD to a Japanese-inspired convenience store in Cremorne, our city’s winning venues run the gamut.
Now in its 16th year, the Eat Drink Design Awards are judged by a panel of design and hospitality heavyweights, including Callan Boys (Good Food), Jean-Paul Ghougassain (Ritz and Ghougassain), Jason M. Jones (Entrecôte and Hopper Joint) and Simone McEwan (Nice Projects), with Cassie Hansen – editor of InteriorsAU – as jury chair.
Celebrating the best in hospitality design across Australia, the awards shine a light on the bars, cafés, hotels and retail spaces that are shaping the way we eat, drink and while away our time. This year, Melbourne dominated the field, with Palace Coffee, Melbourne Place and Suupaa (which took home two awards) all recognised for their design brilliance.
Palace Coffee by Kerry Kounnapis Architecture Practice took out Best Café Design, and it’s easy to see why. Tucked into a tiny city laneway, the vibe here is modern minimalism – and it embodies everything we love about Melbourne’s coffee culture: understated, design-led and full of quiet confidence.
Then there’s Melbourne Place by Kennedy Nolan, winner of Best Hotel Design. Situated right in the heart of the city, this boutique stay was praised by the jury for its “rich materiality… without any pretence”.
Perhaps the most boundary-pushing of Mebourne’s winners is Suupaa in Cremorne – a venue so unique it picked up two awards (Best Retail Design for IF Architecture and Best Identity Design for A Friend of Mine). For the uninitiated, Suupaa is a café-slash-Japanese convenience store that blurs the line between retail and dining, combining bold, intricate design with everyday functionality.
The 2025 ceremony also saw The Apollo by George Livissianis – a Sydney icon that’s been redefining modern Greek dining for over a decade – inducted into the Eat Drink Design Awards Hall of Fame, joining Melbourne legends Cumulus Inc., Café Di Stasio and Cookie.
The full gallery of winners is now live here, but if you’re in Melbourne, you don’t need a website to experience them. Grab a flat white at Palace Coffee, drop by Suupaa for a Japanese snack or check into Melbourne Place for a super luxe staycay that proves (once again) that nobody does design quite like Melburnians.
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