Snail of Approval

Rosa Mitchell grew up on a liquorice farm on the outskirts of Catania, in the shadow of Mount Etna. She was seven years old when her family moved to Melbourne, but she carried the markets with her: young men balancing trays of watermelon, a chewy doughnut from a particular bakery near the train station. That’s still how she cooks. A foundation member of Slow Food Melbourne, Rosa didn’t start cooking professionally until her thirties, when she walked into Brigitte Hafner’s kitchen at Gertrude Street Enoteca and asked for a job. She’d been a hairdresser. Brigitte asked if she was sure. Rosa jumped in and hasn’t stopped since. At Rosa’s Canteen, the menu shifts with what’s singing at the market or ripening in her vegetable garden at Yandoit, near Daylesford. Come for the lamb and pea ragu over casarecce, the fig tart made from fruit picked off a friend’s tree, and the feeling that someone cooked this for you specifically.

Matt Wilkinson grew up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, watching his neighbours force rhubarb in hothouses. He arrived in Melbourne in 2000, started as Sous Chef to Shannon Bennett at Vue de Monde, opened his first restaurant at 24, and earned two chef’s hats at Circa The Prince before building Pope Joan in Brunswick around the things he’d always cared most about: vegetables, seasons, and the farmers who grow them. At Montalto Winery on the Mornington Peninsula, a three-acre kitchen garden set the agenda. Now at Roma on Collins Street in the CBD, he’s co-owner and chef alongside restaurateur Con Christopoulos. The menu takes its cue from Roman “fifth quarter” tradition: coratella, pajata, offal given the same attention most kitchens reserve for the prime cuts.

Gigi Pozzoli grew up in Milan, where gelato is taken seriously enough that people will cross a neighbourhood to find a good one. He trained under award-winning gelato maestros, then completed a Le Cordon Bleu Grand Diplôme for good measure. In March 2022 he and his wife Sue Yong opened Gigi’s on Anderson Street in Yarraville. The committee gave Gigi a Snail in his own name, for the standard he holds the counter to.

Ash and Fern worked in environmental science and geochemistry before co-founding Autonomy in 2019. Their backgrounds shaped what they chose to make and how they source it. The range covers bitter aperitivos and amari built from native Australian botanicals: Davidson plum, lemon myrtle, plants growing around them in Central Victoria. Their citrus peels come from Market Juice in Melbourne after pressing, diverted before the bin. Pour it over ice with soda, or use it as the bitter base in a cocktail worth making.

Acide started with pickles and kept going. They now make live lacto-ferments, kimchi, sauerkraut, mustard, hot sauces, and an apple cider vinegar aged twelve months in oak barrels with toasted hay, unpasteurised and unfiltered, still carrying the mother. Everything is small-batch, made in Melbourne, with no artificial additives. The toasted hay vinegar has a smokiness and earthiness that make it worth seeking out on its own.

Olivier Chan Chan left accounting in 2020 to bake, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. He trained through the pandemic over FaceTime calls to Réunion, where he grew up. Those calls show in the counter: pandan-coconut cake, ube cookies made from purple yam, yuzu Basque cheesecake alongside the French classics. The Newport micro bakery opened in January 2024, and the queue on Saturday mornings has not let up since.

James Mele learned salami-making from his extended Italian family, then spent years refining it and travelling to Italian food festivals to push further. He uses free-range pork and makes everything in small batches. His Fennel Salami took the Overall Category Champion at the AMIC Australian Charcuterie Excellence Awards in 2023, along with Gold in four other categories at the same event. He also runs hands-on classes in sausage-making and butchering throughout the year.

Alice and Jake Mahar co-founded Corner Store Network with their father Andrew, starting with a barbecue, a popcorn popper, and 100 grams of roasted Timorese beans. They now import 16 tonnes of green coffee annually from 368 farming families in Timor-Leste’s Ermera region, paid directly at 17% above the international fair-trade price. Jake roasts in Oakleigh; Alice runs the preserving program, which turns donated fruit and vegetables into long-life preserves for Australians experiencing food insecurity. For every kilo roasted, they plant a tree.

Jacqui Henshaw is a photographer; Keith Smith is a designer and musician. In 2020 they built a gin from three native botanicals, saltbush, sea spray, and desert lime, macerated with fresh limes to produce a citrus-forward spirit with a dry coastal edge. The flavour grew from family holidays at Wye River on the Great Ocean Road. The name came from one of Jacqui’s earlier art exhibitions. They bottled the first batch in late 2021.

Milk, cream, fresh eggs, sugar, and the best ingredients Gigi Pozzoli and Sue Yong can find, made from scratch every morning. No artificial colours. No shortcuts. The flavours change with whatever is fresh, and up to 70% of each sorbet is real fruit. In 2023 the Yarraville gelateria became the first in Victoria to earn a Snail of Approval.

Monica Cavarsan grew up on her family’s dairy farm outside Timboon in western Victoria, eating butter her mother churned by hand. On a trip to France she found a reference for that standard at the Bordier Creameries, then completed a formal butter-making apprenticeship at the University of Wisconsin. She founded Lard Ass in 2017. The butter is single-batch churned from grass-fed Victorian cream, hand kneaded and hand wrapped, salted with pink lake salt from Mount Zero. Flavoured rolls come with roasted fennel seeds, black garlic, or miso.

Hamish and Tim grew up on a farm in Moglonemby, a small community in the Strathbogie Ranges where flooded creek crossings and tractor rescues were part of the school run. They brew pale ales and lagers from Australian ingredients, built for people who know how to pick themselves up after a rough week.

Sara O’Callaghan built Bursaria on a single idea, to use the freshest seasonal produce and cook it with care. She runs the boutique catering operation from The Refectory at Werribee Park, a 19th-century mansion set in formal gardens in Melbourne’s west. Sara’s instinct is to let the produce do the work and keep complexity out of the way.

Miek Paulus is Belgian-born and French-trained, and she arrived in Wallington after meeting her husband in the French Alps, where they made daily trips to a small bakery down the road for bread. “Ket” means young street urchin in Belgian, which suits her operation in a rustic shed among gumtrees on Grubb Road. Every loaf is 100% sourdough; the croissants take five days. Peacocks and goats roam the property. A second shop opened in Belmont in 2025.

Ivan Larcher is a French-trained cheesemaker of global standing; Alison Lansley left corporate law to follow her passion for cheese and education. They founded Long Paddock in 2021 inside The Mill Castlemaine, a converted 19th-century woollen mill on Dja Dja Wurrung country. Their milk comes from the Attwell family’s certified-organic farm at Girgarre. They name their cheeses after Australian flora and geology: Banksia, Ironbark, Sundew, Driftwood. Banksia won gold at the Mondial du Fromage in France in 2025.

Lorenzo Tron and Roberto Davoli bought a pizza shop on Melville Road in 2016. Tron’s mother is vegan and visits from Trieste; finding somewhere they could all share a meal in Melbourne proved harder than it should. He solved that. Shop225 was the first pizzeria in Australia accredited by Coeliac Australia, with a kitchen divided into two dedicated zones. The dough rests for 72 hours, then bakes in a custom wood-fired oven built by Giuseppe Colosimo. The 50 Top Pizza Awards ranked it 28th in the world in 2025.

G’s Bees has been running hives in central Victoria for over 17 years, producing raw honey from bees working the eucalyptus scrub and farmland around Clunes. The honey is bottled as the bees leave it: unfiltered, untreated, tasting of wherever the hives sit that season. The flavour shifts year to year.

In 1981, Lina and Tony Siciliano planted vines and olive trees on a suburban block in East Keilor, building from memories of their home in Varapodio, Calabria. Their son Angelo now makes the wine; Lina manages the rest. The estate produces cold-pressed Frantoio olive oil, homemade preserves, pickled olives, and bread baked on-site. It sits surrounded by new housing and is open by appointment.

Mark Rathbone’s family converted to biodynamic farming in December 1965. His father attended lectures by Alex Podolinsky, the founder of Australian Demeter Biodynamics, in paddocks and often in the rain. Mark grew up on the farm, worked through both conventional and biodynamic food systems, and now sells certified biodynamic fruit and vegetables at farmers markets.

Daniela Mollica co-founded Slow Food Melbourne in 1996, then spent four years in Tuscany before returning with a specific intention: raise Chianina cattle in South Gippsland. The Chianina is one of the oldest breeds in the world, the animal behind Bistecca alla Fiorentina, porcelain-white and large. Her partner Sam Walker, a fifth-generation Australian farmer, runs the herd at Glen Alvie, 100% grass-fed and free-range. The carcasses are hung and dry-aged in the traditional way. Since buying the farm, they have also planted over 22,000 native trees.

Ben Barrow is a mechanical engineer who planted his first hazelnut trees at Carboor with his wife Maxine in 2015. The Ovens Valley has the climate hazelnuts need: high rainfall and cold winters long enough to trigger nut production. Carboor now grows 11,000 trees across 240 acres and processes the harvest into oil, butter, and dukkah. About 90% of Australia’s hazelnuts are imported from Turkey. Ben and Maxine are among the growers changing that.

Cathy Palmer spent her career in the music industry before founding How Now Dairy in Numurkah. The dairy operates on one firm rule: calves stay with their mothers and are never slaughtered. The milk is produced without hormones, additives, or the efficiency interventions standard in conventional dairy. It is additive-free, certified organic, and tastes of the pasture it comes from.

Julie Bennett has managed the kitchen gardens at Montalto for over 20 years, overseeing three acres recognised as among the oldest and most established kitchen gardens in Victoria. She farms using organic and permaculture principles: no soil is ever turned over, and compost from on-site waste goes back into the beds. She saves seeds in winter and plants them out for chefs who will cook with them months later. The garden currently runs 45 varieties of heirloom tomatoes in summer, plus berries, fruit trees, herbs, and vegetables across the estate’s 80-acre property.

The Pileggi family’s roots in olive oil go back generations, to the small Calabrian town of Cosentini. John Pileggi planted 1,200 Frantoio olive trees at the foot of Mount Macedon in 1999, completing the grove two years after purchasing the Gisborne property in 1997. The oil is cold-pressed, non-filtered, and non-blended, certified organic with Australian Certified Organic. It won the Small Business Awards for Olive Oil Producer of the Year in Australia in 2021. The cafe and shop open on the second Saturday of each month.

Andrew and Marianne farm blueberries on a historic property in Pheasant Creek, in the Kinglake Ranges north of Melbourne. The farm sits in regenerating bushland, run to organic principles with a commitment to preserving native flora around the orchard.