Constellation

The menu changes when the market changes. Our kitchen walks to Queen Victoria Market three mornings a week and builds the tasting menu around what came in that day. There is no printed menu to take home.

Five courses. Each one anchored in Melbourne produce -- Yarra Valley dairy, Port Phillip Bay seafood, Gippsland beef. The wine list is almost entirely Victorian. We keep a short selection of imports for the curious, but most guests end up somewhere in the Mornington Peninsula by dessert.

Constellation is not the hotel restaurant. It is a restaurant that happens to sit on the hotel's roof. Separate entrance on Gertrude Street. Separate identity. Come as a guest, come from the neighbourhood, come from across town. The food does not care where you slept.

The room seats forty across the rooftop and a small covered terrace, with heaters and blankets for the cold months and the whole of the inner north laid out below once the sun drops. It is one sitting a night, not two, so the table is yours for the evening — nobody is waiting in the wings to turn it. Service is attentive when you want it and invisible when you don't, and the team can talk you through every plate and every pour without reciting a script.

We cook one menu, the five courses, the same for the room each night. Tell us your allergies and what you genuinely cannot eat when you book and the kitchen will adapt rather than apologise; vegetarian and pescatarian versions are built the same morning from the same market run. We are dinner only, Thursday through Sunday, from six. Walk-ins are welcome at the bar if a seat opens, but the dining room books out most weekends a fortnight ahead, so it pays to call early.