The people behind Australia’s favourite restaurants gathered at Flower Drum in Melbourne to toast the winners in Gourmet Traveller’s 2011 Restaurant Awards.

Multicoloured tomatoes, stripy eggplant, vibrant broad beans and heavenly celery have sprung to life in Stephanie Alexander’s garden.

In April the number-one spot in the World's 50 Best Restaurants poll was taken from El Bulli by Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen. In October, Noma, a cookbook by chef René Redzepi, hits the shelves and Redzepi will visit Australia to promote it in conjunction with the Sydney International Food Festival and Phaidon. On the eve of his return to Australia trip, Redzepi spoke to Gourmet Traveller chief restaurant critic Pat Nourse.

Melbourne's Flower Drum was the scarlet setting this year for the Australian restaurant business's night of nights, the Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Awards and the launch of the 2011 edition of the GT Australian Restaurant Guide.

We’ve downed forks, the votes are in, and we’re proud to present the Australian Gourmet Traveller 2011 Restaurant Awards.

This list has been compiled using our star ratings, moderated by our state and national editors. Every restaurant listed in the Guide should offer a winning dining experience; any that achieve a placement in the Top 100 represent another order of excellence again.

There’s a riot of colour in Stephanie Alexander’s garden, from exotic South American tubers to purple-podded peas.

Call it the snow-egg effect. Peter Gilmore’s Sydney restaurant has been booked out for months. Now the chef with a passion for produce presents a sumptuous cookbook – and that recipe.

Want a snapshot of the movers and shakers in the Australian food scene? Look no further than the nominees for this year’s GT Restaurant Awards.

Winter salad greens, sugarsnap peas, young beetroot and narcissus flourish this month in Stephanie Alexander’s garden.

Spain's ethical foie gras, now available in Australia, is controversial in a new way, writes Richard Cornish.

From the food and the venue to the outstanding winners, the focus was on the country’s finest at this year’s Gourmet Traveller Travel Awards.

After seven years Down Under, chef Bruno Loubet has returned to London to head a new restaurant – but he’s taken his laid-back Brisbane attitude with him, writes Guy Dimond.

Pierre Hermé, Paris’s master of the macaron, talks pastry with local sweet star Adriano Zumbo.

Tender shoots of garlic, heads of young broccoli and feathery clusters of flat-leaf parsley are emerging in Stephanie Alexander’s winter garden.

Infatuated with Australia, Momofuku’s David Chang recalls his trip and shares recipes, including his famous pork buns.

Out of the pool, food is my love, writes Olympic champ and Celebrity MasterChef winner Eamon Sullivan.

The mornings have turned crisp, and Stephanie Alexander’s garden is looking a little bare, but Tuscan kale, artichokes and broad beans battle on.

Stephanie Alexander joins Gourmet Traveller with a new monthly column on growing your own kitchen garden. This month, we’re planting leeks, peas and spinach.

Whether it’s a rustic dish that reminds them of their mammas’ cooking, or a fresh take on a classic, Australia’s best Italian chefs nominate their favourite Italian dishes.

The humble grissino, pride of Turin, has saved a prince from death, captivated Napoleon and inspired the Futurists, writes John Irving. And you thought it was just a breadstick.

Evolution, not revolution, is the way for modern Italian food, says its champion, chef Massimo Bottura.

It’s a Melbourne phenomenon: the rise and rise of modern Middle Eastern cuisine. Michael Harden rides the second wave of the city’s sumac-spiced love affair.

Josh Emett returns to Melbourne this year to head the kitchens of Gordon Ramsay's Maze and Maze Grill.

New York’s Momofuku is a modern-day restaurant phenomenon, but what’s it all about? With chef David Chang visiting Australia in March, Pat Nourse offers this primer.

It’s time to take our annual foodism test. Your obsession could win you one of four fabulous KitchenAid stand mixers, designed for those who really love to cook.

Gourmet Traveller's state editors give you the lowdown on their favourite dishes of 2009.

We had a ball when fine Italian food and sparkling good company all came together for a good cause at the annual Exposure Gala. PHOTOGRAPHY DANIEL MAHON

Doomsayers be damned - 2009 has been a hell of a good year for eats, with plenty of great new stuff bursting onto the scene at both the spangled fine-diners and the food-court level.

Christmas catch
We’ve gone hunting and gathering across the country to bring you the best for your Christmas table.

In another busy year for food publishing, there were some shining stars you’ll want under your tree – to give or receive. Here are the brightest, hand-picked by the GT editorial team.

Pat Nourse caught up with the star pastry chef at his Sydney café to talk chocolate (he eats about eight handfuls a day), the future of desserts (smoke and bubblegum?) and his stance on the Violet Crumble/Crunchie divide.

On the eve of publication of Thai Street Food, his exploration of the cuisine of the noodle stalls, soup vendors and papaya-pounders of Bangkok and surrounds, London-based Australian Thai authority David Thompson sits down at Sailors Thai on a sunny Sydney morning to talk to Pat Nourse about kanom jin fermented rice noodles, the complexity and dynamic nature of Asian hawker foodways, opening a Thai restaurant in Thailand and why you shouldn't put your photographer in the back seat.

Julia Child introduced French cuisine to ’60s America, and now – thanks to Hollywood’s Nora Ephron – her home-cooking ethos is as influential as ever, writes Cerentha Harris.

The 2010 Restaurant Awards were celebrated in style at Rockpool Bar & Grill in Sydney. Here are the winners after the event.

Pat Nourse and Kerryn Burgess track down some of the best in the business and, amid the rattle of pans, find out what it really takes to rise to the top.

We’ve downed forks, the votes are in, and we are proud to present the Australian Gourmet Traveller 2010 Restaurant Awards.

Oh, lordy. If you were asked to dream up the best wine list in the world, no expense spared, all indulgences indulged, all bases covered, all classic estates and legendary vintages included, you probably still couldn’t come close to matching the very real wine list at Sydney’s Rockpool Bar & Grill. This list is winning […]

It’s a big ask in terms of time, distance and money to eat at Dunkeld’s Royal Mail Hotel, but this is a restaurant that answers all the questions with a resounding yes. It’s a place that truly embraces the philosophies of regionality and seasonality, presenting them in a way that’s unmistakeably modern and complex but […]

Tom Sykes’ first Sydney restaurant job, back in 1996, was at a little place called Rockpool. Fast-forward almost 15 years and Sykes has not only climbed the ranks from waiter to headwaiter to assistant manager to general manager in time for the Sydney Olympics in 2000 in the crucible of the city’s most talked-about restaurant, […]

Gerald Diffey has worked at and with some of Victoria’s great names – Karen Martini, Rita Macali, Tansy Good and Stefano de Pieri among them – and has spread his affable charm wherever he’s appeared. But it’s at his small bar in Rathdowne Street, Carlton, propped next door to the pizza cacophony that is La […]

Jackson’s has always been the kind of restaurant where minor miracles of the edible kind occurred, but the wine list sometimes felt like a bit of an also-ran in the presence of chef/owner Neal Jackson’s perennially quirky fare. Enter Kjell Ove Almeland, a flamboyant Norwegian with a patois so chunky you could carve it. (His […]

There’ll never be a need to carbon date the quantum leap in Australia’s food fashion. Or to ponder its greatest influence. In 1975, Leo Schofield penned the first guide to eating out in Sydney and went on to become the senior restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. Today, as editor-at-large for Australian Gourmet Traveller, […]

In retrospect, the 12 months since the last GT awards might not seem like the most felicitous period in which to open an ambitious new restaurant. And yet here we are with an embarrassment of restaurant riches. It’s hard to remember a year in which the new restaurant gong was anywhere near this hotly contested. […]

When Cam Birt and Stephanie Canfell, partners in Brisbane’s standard-setting Bowery bar, decided to open a dégustation-only restaurant in an old bank building one storey above street level in the still-edgy Fortitude Valley, Ryan Squires topped their chef shopping list. Queensland-bred Squires had made a splash a few years earlier, returning from stints at The […]

Yes, lightning really can strike in the same place twice. If anything, the Quay that is Restaurant of the Year today is, dare we say it, a better place than it was 12 months ago when it first won the award. All the things that made it great then – the unmatched commitment to sourcing […]

Here are the restaurants our reviewers rated best in each state and region at a glance, from those awarded stars to those next most highly ranked.

This list has been compiled using our star ratings, moderated by our state and national editors. Every restaurant listed in the Guide should offer a winning dining experience; any that achieve a placement in the Top 100 represent another order of excellence again.

We award stars to restaurants which we have found to be genuinely and consistently exceptional in their food, wine and hospitality.

We’ve downed forks, the votes are in, and we are proud to present the Australian Gourmet Traveller 2010 Restaurant Awards.

The envelope, please
It’s been an exhaustive process but we’re proud to reveal our short-listed nominees for the 2010 Gourmet Traveller Restaurant Awards.

Backstage at his Sanctuary Cove show, the Kitchen Nightmare speaks to Pat Nourse about the Grimshaw affair and his new Australian project.

Grab a drink, sit down and relax: the talented team behind Sydney restaurant Buzo are doing all the hard work, serving up rustic wintry fare that’s perfect for a weekend away.

Gordon Ramsay worked for some of Europe’s greatest chefs on his way to the top of the cooking game. Not coincidentally, perhaps, he also worked for some individuals who were as well known back-of-house for their tempers as they were known out front for their culinary grace. It’s no secret that Ramsay gives it today as good as he got it as a young chef, and he’s unflinching in his assessment of the top terrors he’s encountered in his time in the kitchen.

With duck confit and steak frites thick on the ground these days, a good bistro meal isn’t hard to find. But what about a great one? We track down the country’s best, dish by dish.

The Pat Nourse Polaroid files: "These pictures were taken at the winners' lunch at St John restaurant the day after the World's 50 Best Restaurants ceremony. I've had the pleasure of chairing the Australian and Pacific votes. It's not a paid gig, but an invite to join the critics who head the other voting panels and the award-winning chefs at a lunch hosted by Fergus Henderson is incentive enough. This year's menu kicked off with an ox heart salad (the hearts of oxen, not a type of tomato), followed by pig's head and potato pie (with plenty of mustard) and ice-cream flavoured with the Dr Henderson, Fergus's favourite cocktail of Fernet Branca and crème de menthe."