World-famous Cake Picnic returns to Melbourne – and the theme is Australiana

1600 cakes, an LA diner frequented by Hollywood celebrities, and a rare opportunity to enjoy a long lunch by a coveted two-hatted restaurant. These are just a few of our favourite additions to next year’s bumper Melbourne Food and Wine Festival program.

The festival is slated to be one of the biggest in its 33 years running, with 200 events taking place across both Melbourne and regional Victoria. It’s also spanning 17 days – from March 5 to 21 – instead of the usual 10, meaning a whole extra week of additional eating and drinking.

Back for more baking fun is the San Francisco-born Cake Picnic, a mega 1600-person cake swap that debuted in Melbourne at this year’s festival in March. The “no cake, no entry” policy remains, but an additional “edible Australiana” theme – an idea of cake queen and guest creative director Katherine Sabbath – is likely to spark even more creativity among eager bakers (this year featured creations such as a spiced chocolate cake with passionfruit tahini cream in the shape of an anchovy tin).

“Is it a recreation of Kylie Minogue’s appearance at the Sydney 2000 Olympics in cake form? Is it Uluru done in ganache? Or is it just Australian traditional cakes?,” says the festival’s creative director Pat Nourse. “That’s what I want to see.”

The large-scale potluck is also moving from Kings Domain to the grounds of South Yarra’s Como House and Gardens, and will run across two sessions of 800 cakes to allow more room for guests to roam and load up on spongy slices.

As always, the festival will kick off with the 1600-person World’s Longest Lunch, this year hosted by Brigitte Hafner of Red Hill’s two-hatted farm-to-table fine diner Tedesca Osteria, winner of the 2026 Age Good Food Guide Regional Restaurant of the Year award. Hafner will be cooking a three-course meal starring produce her team has been growing at the Tedesca farm specifically for the event over the past six months.

Meanwhile, some major Hollywood star power is fuelling this year’s program thanks to Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil star Phil Rosenthal, who is bringing his famed Los Angeles diner Max & Helen’s to Australia for its first residency outside the US.

Frequented by the likes of A-listers Timothee Chalamet, Hailey Bieber and Ted Danson, the LA diner will appropriately take over Crown’s LA-themed restaurant Marmont for 10 days, dishing brunch-y diner fare from loaded hot dogs to egg cream floats and Max & Helen’s famous waffles. Plus, bookings are available – so you can skip the eight-hour queues the restaurant is known to attract on the West Coast.

“[Phil] is very enthusiastic about Melbourne,” Nourse says.

And the international heavyweights don’t stop there. The Global Dining Series is bringing together Victoria’s homegrown talent and some of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, including Hong Kong’s Wing – recently ranked number five in The 50 Best Restaurants 2026 list – with chef Vicky Cheng hitting the pans at Armadale’s three-hatted Amaru for two nights.

It’s one of many events across the program spotlighting the brilliance and depth of Chinese cooking, be it more traditional in style or more expansive.

“Economically and culturally, China has reclaimed its place on the world stage in the last couple of decades, and I think that is certainly true of its food as well,” Nourse says. “I think there’s a lot of appetite in Melbourne for really well done, original interpretations of Chinese food.”

Melbourne is now more familiar with French-Chinese cooking thanks to Rosheen Kaul’s newly opened Little Rose in Fitzroy, but Filipino-Australian chef Hanz Gueco has been pushing the concept at Cheval d’Or in Paris since 2023. Gueco is returning Down Under to cook up a storm at Victor Liong’s Lee Ho Fook, while Kaul is also getting in the action, teaming up with the intergenerational team from Sydney’s Northern Chinese stalwart Grape Garden for a special residency at Little Rose.

As for Chinese with a Thai inflection? Pichaya Soontornyanakij (AKA Chef Pam) is bringing the Thai-Chinese cooking that earned her Bangkok restaurant Potong a Michelin star to Crown’s Ging Thai. It’s a chance to get a sneak preview of her first Australian restaurants opening in Sydney and Perth next year.

Other Sydneysiders joining the party are the one-hatted Fontana, Baba’s Place and Ante who are joining forces with Melbourne’s Osteria Ilaria, Lilac Wine and Embla respectively for one-off lunch and dinner events.

Nourse expects the festival to exceed its recent guest list of 117,000, particularly with more punters likely to be in town for the MCG’s 150th Anniversary Test Match between Australia and England, taking place mid-March.

But you won’t need to battle for tickets to every event. There is such a thing as a free lunch – if you get in quickly enough – at pop-ups like the Festival of Korean Fried Chicken, where 1000 free serves of juicy fried chook will be up for grabs in the CBD for one day only. And The Baker’s Dozen is also returning to Fed Square for the festival’s final weekend with its biggest line-up yet, including about 30 of Melbourne’s top bakeries and sandwich shops, from Hector’s Deli and Baker Bleu to Charlie Duffy’s hit newcomer Daybaker.

Melbourne Food & Wine Festival runs from March 5 to 21, 2027. Pre-sale tickets are available to MFWF subscribers today from 10am; general public tickets are released from 10am on Thursday, November 19. melbournefoodandwine.com.au