In conversation: Dani Valent on what makes Melbourne special for food lovers

18.11.2025

Between her roles as a journalist, critic, podcast host and author, Dani Valent is one of Australia’s leading voices in food.

In all of these creative expressions, there’s a consistent throughline: how food experiences can connect people to place – and to one another.

How do you describe what you do?

On my business card, it says writer, eater, traveller, cook – and that almost encompasses the range of things I do.

You’ve described restaurants as ‘complicated animals’ and I’d love to dig into that a little.

A restaurant can seem very simple; isn’t it just about getting ingredients into a room, preparing them, and then putting them in front of people?   But they can also be so rich and complex in a beautiful way, and – sometimes – in a chaotic and alarming way. It carries all the stories of how the food was grown or brought into the building, as well as the cultural context that comes with it.

How did you find your way into writing about food?

I fell in love with food writing when I was working as a travel writer for Lonely Planet. I was going around the world writing about destinations. I loved it, but it was very detail oriented. At the time, travel guides had everything in them: opening hours, bus stops, where the toilets were.   Then, Lonely Planet started doing guides to world cuisine, and I was invited to do a book about Turkish food, for which I was wildly underqualified. I got off the plane in Istanbul and started investigating, and on my first day, someone was like ‘Oh, you gotta go to this guy that’s making this amazing yoghurt. You get on this boat, get off at the third stop, go down the second laneway and knock on this garage door.’  I found the guy. And I was transported into his world with all the context around it and all the occasions when the yoghurt would be consumed.   I instantly fell in love with food writing because it's just at the heart of everything that's important to people. It cuts across every kind of discipline or area of interest: politics, social justice, immigration, economics, science, technology. It’s the best lens to look at the world through.

Melbourne is a special place in terms of food culture. Can you tell us about your relationship with this city?

I feel so lucky to be a food writer in Melbourne. It’s such a special place. If you think of the Indigenous history of where we live, work and eat, there’s endless culture and history – both wonderful and traumatic – to engage with.  If you think about Melbourne as a city of immigrants, then there are endless layers that are continuing every year. People are always bringing their own stories and backgrounds and heritage to Melbourne and reframing them.   One thing that's special about Melbourne, which I don't think we prize enough, is our access to produce. More than 50 per cent of the food we eat here was grown within two hours of the city. In terms of a metropolis, that’s quite rare.

How do you understand the relationship between food and place?

You’re always eating food somewhere, aren’t you? We’re always eating in a place, and all of the things that might mean.   I think we’re quite lucky in terms of the structure of our city and how it’s grown. I even think the tram lines are really important. We have a lot of really fantastic strip shops and neighbourhoods where immigrant communities come in and build new layers.

Melbourne also seems to be an environment that embraces experimentation.

There is a freedom here to change cuisines and express yourself and borrow from different places. Melbourne is very receptive to that.   We’re in the middle of a Korean wave at the moment, and a lot of those Korean chefs didn’t train in cooking Korean food in Korea. They came to cooking that food through being trained in Australia and learning about different cuisines. They’re using techniques from European cuisine, for example, and applying it to Korean ideas. It’s Korean food that you wouldn’t find in Korea – It’s thrilling.

How do you think about authenticity in terms of food? It can be a term that’s quite fraught with negative connotations.

It's such a loaded word. I was writing recently about Misuzu’s, a Japanese restaurant in Albert Park that’s been there since 1994. The owner, Misuzu, is from Japan, but she only started cooking in Melbourne, when she was in a share house and didn’t really know what she was going to do with her life.   Her housemates loved her cooking, and she thought, ‘Oh, maybe there's something in this. Maybe being Japanese is a good thing, something I can express’.  On their website, they say “Authentic Japanese cuisine”, but I don't think it's food that you would find in Japan or even in another Japanese restaurant here. It is very authentic to Misuzu, who comes from Shikoku Island. And her own particular sensibility as someone who loves artisanal craft and techniques, and loves adding parsley to her nasu dengaku because it looks great and tastes nice.   It's authentic. But authentic to what?  I think about hot pot as another example. It originated from the leftover bits that weren't sold to wealthy people, and it was the wharf workers who put the scraps in a pot.   Now, it’s something you might find in a restaurant here, and it’s Wagyu beef in the pot. It’s so elevated. It’s just very free here. People can experiment – and there’s a lot of joy in that.