Navi opened in a narrow Yarraville shopfront in 2018, and from its first year it has been one of the most talked-about tasting-menu rooms in Melbourne. The restaurant is the work of chef-owner Julian Hills, an RMIT graduate with a bachelor of fine arts in drawing and ceramics — a background that is not a biographical detail but the operating logic of the whole restaurant. Hills designs the menus. He throws the ceramics every plate arrives on. He built much of the room himself. The name, Navi, is a Swedish Sami word for "a bowl of food gifted in thanks." The cooking is everything that title implies.
There are 25 seats across a low-ceilinged room, arranged around a counter that faces an open kitchen where Hills and his small brigade work in quiet concentration. The menu is a fixed five-course ($135) or eight-course ($170) tasting, with a tight wine pairing from a list that leans low-intervention and heavily Victorian. Dishes change often — sometimes weekly — and follow the produce with a discipline that verges on stubborn. If the mountain pepper isn't at its peak, it is not on the plate.
Hills' cooking is built around native Australian ingredients that other chefs treat as garnish and he treats as centre. Warrigal greens, wattleseed, saltbush, bunya nuts, pepper-leaf, finger lime, muntries, lemon myrtle — they arrive across the menu in ways that feel considered rather than performative. A dish of smoked kangaroo loin with charred brassica and wattleseed sauce. A single oyster with dashi of native pepperleaf. A dessert of roasted bunya nut, cultured cream, and wild honey from hives in the Otways.
In 2023, Julian Hills was named Good Food Guide's Chef of the Year — recognition of a body of work that is quietly among the most distinctive in the country. The kitchen has held its Two Hats ever since. Unlike many of the city's fine-diners, Navi sits in Yarraville rather than the CBD — a fifteen-minute walk from the station, or a short drive across the Maribyrnong. The journey is part of the ritual. You do not stumble into Navi on a whim.
Reservations are taken through the restaurant's website and typically sell out four to six weeks ahead for weekends. The room is small and the pace is long — plan for two and a half hours of dinner. Dress is relaxed. The staff know the menu in granular detail and will walk you through it without performing; the tone is Yarraville, not Collins Street.
