Royal Mail Hotel

The Royal Mail is a magnificent restaurant built around pleasant obsessions, interwoven and shared. There's the owner's incredible cellar and nearby farms, the chef's passion for great produce coaxed into edible art, and the diners who have made the roads to Dunkeld well-travelled routes of culinary pilgrimage. These hungry wanderers receive decorous service in an understated dining room, though there's no doubting the sense of occasion on the plate - and even the crockery itself can be breathtaking. Some dishes are gorgeous paeans to produce, such as a plate of many-hued carrots with soy cream or opalescent flathead fillet with jewel-like pea halves. Other dishes are playful, as with a glossy sheet of chicken skin that shatters like ice and tastes like naughty fun. The menu mirrors the seasons though cult favourites tend to stick around: the lovely yet unlikely combination of eel nougatine, pickled beets, bone marrow and burnt eggplant is but one Royal Mail calling card to Australia's fine-dining pantheon.