Photos: By Michael Bryce
There are two types of people at the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival: those who arrive with a spreadsheet, a booking strategy and sensible shoes, and those who turn up with an entourage, enormous confidence, and the dangerous belief that “we’ll just figure it out when we get there.”
Naturally, I chose the second option.
This is how I found myself leading a small but highly charismatic food militia through Melbourne’s greatest edible obstacle course: Teah Van De Wakker, Paris Gordon, Bianca Kowalczyk, Isy Turner and Darryl Perera in tow, all of us dressed somewhere between “tasteful cultural excursion” and “we might accidentally end up at a rooftop bar until midnight.” It was less a day out and more a soft-launch of a travelling food cult.
I had taken the group to the show with the calm authority of a man who had read half an article, retained three nouns, and was now behaving like a Michelin-starred Moses. Melbourne was our promised land. The bread was our scripture. The wine was our legal counsel.
And there was wine. A dangerous amount of very good wine.
The Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, of course, does not play around. Every March, Melbourne stops being a city and becomes a tasting menu with tram lines. The laneways hum, the restaurants flex, the chefs collaborate, the queues develop personalities, and suddenly everyone is discussing fermentation like they personally invented cabbage.
Broadsheet had called it a festival worth nailing. We interpreted “nailing” loosely. Less “precision planning,” more “culinary jazz with a risk of pastry-induced collapse.”
Our first mission had the unmistakable scent of baked goods and emotional vulnerability: Baker’s Dozen. Any event that gathers Melbourne’s elite bakers in one place is not so much a festival stop as a trap laid by butter. Croissants glistened like jewellery. Tarts sat there smugly, aware of their own architectural importance. Someone said, “We should just get one thing each,” which was adorable, because five minutes later we were eating like a committee reviewing evidence.
Teah approached the food situation with style, strategy and the polished instincts of someone who knows exactly what works for her. While the rest of us were being emotionally compromised by pastry, she was already scanning the horizon like a festival professional.
Which is exactly how she found the epic Mexican food van.
It appeared like a beacon: smoke, spice, colour, corn, salsa, and the kind of menu that makes you stop mid-conversation and say, “Wait. We need to investigate this immediately.” Teah was naturally drawn to it, and honestly, she was right. The van had main-character energy. Big flavours, proper heat, fresh ingredients, and enough attitude to make a taco feel like it had its own publicist.
Paris had the look of someone quietly ranking every bite for future reference. Bianca was charmingly composed until dessert appeared, at which point her eyes said, “I will be making several decisions my trainer cannot know about.” Isy became spiritually aligned with carbohydrates. Darryl, meanwhile, gave every dish the thoughtful nod of a man who understands both flavour and theatre.
I was merely the host, the guide, the shepherd of snacks. A noble role. A ridiculous role. A role that involved pointing confidently at things I had never eaten and saying, “This is meant to be incredible,” which is how most of Melbourne’s food scene has operated since 2009.
From there, the festival unfolded like a very expensive choose-your-own-adventure book. There were crisp whites that made everyone suddenly start using words like “mineral.” There were elegant reds that had us nodding as though we understood the terroir on a personal level. There were sparkling pours that arrived like tiny celebrations in a glass. There were natural wines that tasted like sunshine, mischief and one questionable decision in Fitzroy.
At first, we were tasting responsibly. Swirl, sniff, sip. Very mature. Very refined. Then the festival did what festivals do, and somewhere between the second excellent pour and the third enthusiastic “oh wow, that’s actually beautiful,” the group’s collective volume increased by approximately 38 percent.
Nobody was drunk. Let’s be clear.
We were festival tipsy.
Which is different.
Puramist Gin
Festival tipsy means you are still elegant, but you begin describing a pinot noir as “emotionally available.” It means you start calling every bartender “legend.” It means someone says, “Should we get another glass?” and the answer is yes before the question has finished leaving their mouth.
By mid-afternoon, our entourage had achieved that rare festival state where nobody was quite hungry, nobody was quite full, and everyone was absolutely prepared to keep eating.
This was when Fancy Hank’s entered the mythology.
FRANK151 had been invited by Fancy Hank’s — https://fancyhanks.com/collections/shop-all — which made perfect sense, because there are few brands better suited to collide with Melbourne Food & Wine Festival energy than a culture platform with a taste for characters and a BBQ institution built on smoke, hustle and sauce you immediately want to put on irresponsible quantities of food.
Fancy Hank’s came from humble beginnings — and a whole lotta hustle. It all kicked off in 2012 when Kent Bell launched a roaming pop-up, slinging authentic American BBQ out of a food truck across Melbourne. After two years on the move, Kent teamed up with long-time mate Mike Patrick. United by a love of good food and big flavours, the pair set their sights on something more permanent — and that’s when things really started to heat up.
And heat up they did.
The Team At Fancy Hank’s
There is something deeply Melbourne about that trajectory: start with a food truck, add smoke, add mates, add obsession, then somehow end up with a BBQ institution, rooftop energy, sauce bottles, seasonings, and enough cultural pull to make everyone nearby suddenly crave brisket. Fancy Hank’s is proof that if you smoke meat long enough in this city, eventually someone will hand you a following, a sauce range, and possibly a crane for a two-tonne smoker.
By the time the Fancy Hank’s chapter of the day arrived, the group had fully become a travelling review panel. Not appointed by anyone. Not qualified in any official sense. But extremely available for commentary.
Teah declared something “dangerously good,” which is the highest rating on the Teah scale, just above “I need a second bite to confirm” and below “do not talk to me while I’m processing this.” Paris offered a diplomatic but devastatingly accurate observation about sauce balance. Bianca looked at the spread with the quiet confidence of someone who could make a grazing table look like editorial content. Isy found joy in everything, which was both beautiful and suspicious. Darryl appeared to be calculating how much smoked flavour a human could absorb before becoming legally classified as brisket.
And me? I stood there, proud. Not because I had cooked anything, booked anything flawlessly, or contributed meaningfully to the hospitality industry, but because I had brought the right people to the right city at the right time. Sometimes leadership is simply gathering your friends and walking them toward carbohydrates, wine and smoked meat with conviction.
Isy Turner, Teah Van De Wakker, Paris Gordon, & Our Homies At Sheep Dog Whiskey.
As the festival rolled on, Melbourne kept doing what Melbourne does best: making indulgence feel intellectual. A wine bar became a pilgrimage site. A sandwich became a personality test. A casual snack became a monologue. You don’t simply eat; you participate in a civic ceremony involving napkins, recommendations and at least one person saying, “Actually, the texture is insane.”
There were more wines, naturally. Beautiful wines. Dangerous wines. Wines that made us think we should all become collectors despite having absolutely no cellar, no plan, and possibly no remaining budget. The reds were rich and smooth, the whites were crisp and flirty, the bubbles were pure chaos in evening wear. Every glass felt like Melbourne was leaning across the table saying, “Go on, you’ve had a big weekend.”
And we had.
The whole thing felt like the epic cap on an already amazing weekend in Melbourne. The perfect final scene. The credits rolling over full glasses, smoky plates, Mexican food van triumphs, bad jokes, great friends and the kind of laughter that makes strangers at nearby tables wonder if they should know you.
Our group became, briefly and magnificently, a moving spectacle of appetite and opinion. We laughed too loudly. Ordered too ambitiously. Shared plates with the chaotic generosity of people who love each other but still track who got the last bite. At one point, someone said, “I couldn’t eat another thing,” and then immediately accepted food from someone else’s fork. This is friendship. This is festival culture. This is Melbourne.
By dusk, the city had that warm, post-feast glow. Not golden hour exactly — more like gravy hour. The kind of light that makes every glass look fuller, every joke funnier, and every plan to “just have one more stop” seem not only reasonable but historically necessary.
We had not merely attended the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. We had entered it, been seasoned by it, lightly battered by it, softly marinated in wine, guided lovingly toward an excellent Mexican food van, and sent back into the world with better stories and worse posture.
Teah Van De Wakker, Paris Gordon, Bianca Kowalczyk, Isy Turner and Darryl Perera had been the perfect entourage: stylish, hungry, hilarious, and constitutionally incapable of letting a good bite or great wine pass without commentary. I had taken them to the show, but Melbourne took over from there.
In the end, that is the point. You can plan the festival. You can read the guides. You can circle the events, chase the collabs, follow the smoke, and pretend your itinerary is a serious document rather than a wish list with snacks. But the real magic happens in the messy middle: the unexpected pour, the shared fork, the food van victory, the joke that gets funnier with every glass, the BBQ origin story that reminds you every great feast starts with someone mad enough to begin.
Fancy Hank’s started with a food truck and a dream. FRANK151 came through with culture in its back pocket. Melbourne turned the whole thing into theatre.
And us? We came, we saw, we over-ordered, we got a little tipsy, and we gave the weekend the send-off it deserved.
A perfect festival, really.