Bookmark some of our favourite dining experiences where you can BYO.
Hooray for BYO. Whether you’re painstakingly selecting something from the cellar for a special occasion or grabbing a bottle from the store on your way to an impromptu catch-up, there’s a lot to be said for enjoying the wines you love in a restaurant setting (without the big mark-up).
Here’s a collection of our favourite BYO restaurants in Melbourne – all classics, or classics in the making, with some true stalwarts among them. They’re all dedicated to the good times and are the perfect places to make the most of your best buys.
Is it odd that this, a restaurant with one of the best wine lists in the land, also does BYO? They’ve got 4,500 bottles, and 30 wines offered by the glass. But who are we to argue the point? It’s a great deal. Having said that, the times you can BYO now are quite specific – it’s just lunch, and Mondays to Wednesdays. If you’re a hospitality worker or otherwise live a life where drinking wine at lunch on a Monday is an option, more power to you. Perhaps you’ll bring Champagne or Chablis or a picpoul or dry sherry to have with some oysters. If you love sauv blanc and/or Sancerre, you’ll find a classic match in the warm salad of goat’s cheese, and the grillades section is more or less made for you to open up your finest reds to enjoy over an entrecôte, onglet or côte de boeuf (translation: hunks of juicy grilled steak).
The fact that we see well-heeled locals bringing their own crystal wine glasses to the South Yarra branch of this Cantonese landmark restaurant goes to show how embedded the BYO culture is here. Whether you’re at South Yarra or Richmond, the classic move would be to go a Victorian pinot (or, hey, a red Burgundy) with the roast duck, but the House’s seafood specials (plenty in the crab and prawn departments) also make beautiful music with chardonnay, vermentino and other fuller whites. Pro tip: they’re also on Uber Eats, so you could potentially do this particular BYO adventure at home.
You’ve been hearing all about Bar Olo, one of the best bars to open in Carlton in years. But what about the OG restaurant that started it all? That’s Scopri. Just a few doors up Nicholson Street, this beloved ristorante has been welcoming diners for more than 15 years. And while it has an impeccable drinks list of its own, it’s long enjoyed a reputation with the wine community for its BYO policy. You’re welcome to bring your own any day of the week, and it’s $30 corkage per bottle. It's not the cheapest BYO in town, so make it count. If you want to go local, take a Victorian nebbiolo or great cool-climate shiraz, perhaps. Otherwise, Italy is the obvious answer – a Barolo or barbera from the north, to nero d’Avola from the south. All are pretty wonderful with fettuccini in duck ragu, or the epic 600g pasture-fed Gippsland rib-eye, char-grilled over Mallee root. Hell yeah.
Speaking of Australian dining landmarks, Jim’s is basically the Parthenon of Melbourne restaurants; a timeless icon standing still (in the best of ways) on Johnston Street, Collingwood. The front room is loud and lively, the back room doubly so, and the food is gutsy, full-flavoured and free of fuss. The BYO policy is also winningly classic and easy to understand: it’s available every day, with no corkage. It’s one of the increasingly rare venues that allows beer BYO, so it’s the perfect place to take your finest craft froth from local heroes like Hop Nation, Brick Lane, Rattenhund or Moon Dog. The other sure thing, of course, would either be Greek wine, or wine made from Greek grapes in Australia, all for the better as you move from dips to octopus, fish to grilled lamb, and into that standard-setting galaktoboureko.
There are people who will tell you that wine and spicy food should have nothing to do with each other. We are not those people. True, chilli can fight tannins in wine, and yes, we might not suggest you bring your most delicate or expensive picks to the table at this outstanding Chinese restaurant. We’re talking the food of the provinces of Sichuan, Hunan and Hubei (aka the spicy ones). Hits include the signature spicy yabbies over wheat noodles in your choice of sauces, several great duck dishes (including Peking duck), and fish swimming in a sea of chilli. It’s not all hot, mind you – you can order a full meal without needing to hit the chilli, no drama – but if you’re thinking of going the fiery route, we’d suggest white wines, nothing heavy or oaky – off-dry whites like chenin blanc and riesling would be the perfect place to experiment.
