Melbourne doesn’t always build dining rooms from scratch. Often, it resurrects them. From rooftop bars reborn from infamous party venues to pâtisseries in one-car garages, these are the transformations that give the city its restless, delicious pulse.
There’s something strangely moving about watching a venue shed one life and slip into another. I found myself thinking about that last night at the opening of Disuko, the new Japanese rooftop and vinyl-backed cocktail bar from MAMAS Dining Group occupying the bones of Madam Brussels; that beloved, slightly cheeky landmark of Melbourne’s going-out era. The pink walls and abundance of astroturf, the wink-wink cocktail theatre, the whole sense of playful performance have all gone. In their place: a svelte terracotta glow, glittering disco balls, and a dining room that feels like a grown-up, more deliberate successor. There’s even a sleek 8-seat Omakase bar, lit to resemble sun-down, a detail that signals just how thoroughly the space has been reimagined. The reincarnation isn’t subtle, it’s glorious.
As I wandered with a drink in hand, I kept thinking about the afterlives of hospitality spaces; how dramatically a room can reinvent itself when the right people decide it’s time. Disuko feels like a confident rewrite. A chapter that nods to the last one without being defined by it.
And then my mind drifted to one of my favourite transformations: Michael Lambie’s Juni. Before it became the atmospheric dining room it now is, it was Officeworks. I once bought a packet of highlighters and a Moleskine there, and now the same footprint hosts a Tom Blachford projection of a 90-minute sunset looping on the opposite wall, a ceiling stripped back to raw concrete beams and stippled with acoustic spray and a bar glowing from a backlit wall framed in roof tiles sourced from China.
But transformations don’t all need to be grand. JC Patisserie Boulangerie in Abbotsford was once just a small private garage, now it greets you with the warm, buttery perfume of croissants and a splendid chandelier. It’s a careful, quiet pâtisserie, and the modest bones only make its glow-up sweeter.
Then there’s Barry’s Garage in Kew. Once a fully functional auto-mechanic with cars hoisted in the air, someone in overalls wiping their hands on a rag, it’s now a sandwich shop with rotating chef residencies. On weekdays they do a pizza sanga, which is unbelievably good and old-school hot dogs. The place still carries its garage DNA, now dressed with a cool Detroit-inspired swagger.
These restaurants carry the ghost-architecture of what came before, and when someone with vision steps into the space, the old stories don’t disappear; they’re absorbed into the new rhythm, a bit like Melbourne itself. I mean, where else would 374 bagpipers descend on a town square to both break a world record, as well as pay homage to a music video from 1976? We eat, we drink, and without meaning to, we commune with the ghosts of stationery aisles, rooftop shenanigans, garages, and grease pits. I love that for us.