Aru opened on Little Collins Street in 2021 as the second restaurant from the team behind Sunda, and from the moment it did, the room's ambition was clear. The centrepiece is a sixteen-metre wood-fired kitchen — sculpted in brass, the fire entirely visible — that stretches along the back wall like a painting in motion. Every dish passes through it. You sit in the room because the fire is in the room.
Chef and part-owner Khanh Nguyen calls the cuisine pre-colonial: a conceptual return to the period when Indonesian seafarers from Sulawesi traded with the Yolngu people of northern Australia, centuries before European arrival. The cooking draws on this lineage and extends it — through Vietnam, southern China, Japan, and the Australian native pantry — via a set of techniques (fire, fermentation, curing, dry-aging, preserving) that precede the modern grill.
The menu is built for sharing. The dishes arrive large: a whole fish pulled from the coals, a clay pot of broken rice with duck fat and fermented duck sausage, dry-aged duck with smoked cavolo nero, a duck-sausage snag that became an instant signature. A tasting menu is offered but the à la carte, ordered generously across a table of six, is how Melburnians have come to eat here. It is the rare fine-dining room genuinely suited to a seven-person booking.
The wine list is 400 strong, with roughly two dozen by the glass, and it was built to meet the food where it lives — big flavours, smoke, acid, spice. There are Austrian Rieslings. There are natural Gamays. There are serious Burgundies and Barolos for the tables that want them. Somm work is confident and unpretentious.
Design — by Fiona Lynch — is theatrical without being decorative. Leather banquettes, patinated brass, low lighting, long sightlines toward the fire. At dinner it reads as a power room with its sleeves rolled up. For teams closing deals, for birthday parties of ten, for the night you want the city to know you took everyone somewhere serious, few Melbourne rooms are better equipped. Reservations open six weeks ahead and large-table bookings (8+) should be made early and directly with the restaurant.
