Be my guest

To the uninitiated, the Royal Mail Hotel in western Victoria probably sounds like any other country pub. Foodies with a finger on the pulse, however, know there's a particularly mouth-watering reason to make their way to Dunkeld, a speck of a town with just 450 residents at the southern tip of Grampians National Park.

The reason is the food coming out of the cutting-edge kitchen run by Dan Hunter, who spent time finetuning his craft at Mugaritz, a restaurant specialising in molecular gastronomy in Spain's Basque region that fellow chefs voted the world's best in this year's San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants list.

Last year, Hunter said "adios" to Mugaritz and returned to his native Australia, where he was persuaded to move to Dunkeld - three hours' drive from Melbourne - by the Royal Mail's general manager-sommelier Lok Thornton.

One year and a bunch of prestigious awards later, gourmands from throughout Australia and overseas are booking themselves a seat in the restaurant as well as a room to waddle back to (between the hotel and its sister property, a sheep station three kilometres down the road, the accommodation ranges from backpacker beds and rooms with scenic outdoor decks to self-contained cottages, a farmhouse and homestead).
Hunter's 10-course $150 tasting menu features elegantly pared-down descriptions (such as the starter of Pacific oyster, green lip abalone and marine essence followed, many courses later, by lamb with young garlic, sheep's milk and liquorice) as well as herbs and vegetables plucked straight from a kitchen garden.

"I've never been worried about getting the crowd per se because there's that old adage: 'make it good and people will come'," Thornton says. "If you look at the San Pellegrino top 10 restaurants in the world, seven of them are effectively in the middle of nowhere - or the European equivalent of the middle of nowhere."

Still, over the past year a few of the Royal Mail's diners have stood out from the rest.

"I've had a woman drive from Noosa," Thornton says. "She read a review . . . and basically got in her car with her husband and drove straight here.

"She literally sat down, picked up her cutlery and went, 'OK, let's go, let's roll.' "

Serious foodies who don't mind how far they journey for a memorable meal - as long as there's a luxurious bed nearby - can climb back into the car at Dunkeld and keep heading west to the Adelaide Hilton, where Cheong Liew presides over The Grange restaurant. Liew's reputation as a master of fusion cuisine is so fierce Simon Bryant (one half of the ABC television show The Cook And The Chef) joined the Hilton to learn from him. (Bryant now runs The Brasserie, another restaurant within the hotel.)
The US Food & Wine Magazine has anointed Liew "one of the world's 10 hottest chefs alive". The Malaysian-born chef can even boast a signature entree: the poetically titled Four Dances of the Sea (a quartet of nibbles comprising soused snook, raw calamari with squid ink noodles, octopus aioli and spiced prawn sushi).

Adelaide Hilton's general manager, Chris Ehmann, says of Liew: "Cheong really is an artist. He has real concern and passion for the food, the way it tastes and the way it feels in your mouth. He's all about textures and colours."

The hotel chain seems to put a premium on employing star chefs. There's Luke Mangan at the Sydney Hilton's Glass Brasserie and news that the Hilton Melbourne South Wharf, opening between Docklands and Southbank in April, is importing an as-yet unnamed one-Michelin-star chef from Spain for its 135-seat eatery nuevo37.

"Dining is an experience and a hotel is really just a lot of bricks and cement," says Ehmann. "We try to create experiences for people. Some people plan their holidays around restaurants. We've had a couple of people like that who travel the world reading up about restaurants and making a holiday out of that experience."

Mangan isn't the only superstar culinary attraction at a Sydney hotel. Since 2003 Tony Bilson, of Berowra Waters fame, has run Bilson's inside the Radisson Plaza Hotel. The Radisson Plaza's general manager, Peter Tudehope, who's particularly fond of Bilson's beetroot and raspberry jelly petits four, says it's the city's "only five-star hotel with a three-hat restaurant".

Making the most of Bilson's presence, the hotel sells three or four $700 packages a week - mostly to honeymooners or couples celebrating an anniversary - that combine dinner at Bilson's with a night in a suite.
While it's common throughout Asia and other regions for luxury hotels to boast renowned chefs, it's different in Australia, Tudehope says. With the rise of good quality, stand-alone restaurants, he says, it can seem untrendy for guests to opt for their hotel restaurant.

In Melbourne, the Crown Entertainment Complex is doing its best to ensure its guests never have to wander elsewhere to find a jaw-dropping meal. Its constellation of fine-dining destinations includes the brasserie by Philippe Mouchel as well as secondary restaurants for star Sydney chefs - Neil Perry's Rockpool Bar & Grill and Guillaume Brahimi's Bistro Guillaume.

Crown also houses an Australian branch of Nobu - remember the fuss when part-owner Robert De Niro flashed through town? - but expect even more of a dither when bad-boy celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay drops by in early 2010 to open one of his Maze restaurants in a third new hotel on the site.

Crown's chief executive, David Courtney, says Maze will be "a major drawcard for local, interstate and international visitors".