25 Best Restaurants in Regional Queensland

From Cooloongatta to Cairns, Queensland is seeing a dining boom. The state is longer than most people remember. We drove the whole thing from the Gold Coast to the Far North and ate accordingly. Like the tourism slogan of years past. Where else but Queensland.

Restaurant Labart Burleigh Heads

Gourmet Traveller gave this place Queensland Restaurant of the Year and they were not wrong, which is not something you get to say about awards lists very often. Alex Munoz Labart's room is sage green and leather, the wine list runs hard on aligoté, and the food sits somewhere between a good Parisian bistro and something more considered than Paris has lately managed. The anchovies from Cantabria are worth mentioning in isolation.

Try confit duck leg, onion soubise, barbecued purple cabbage

Rick Shores Burleigh Heads

Beachfront dining is usually an excuse for mediocrity dressed in a view. Rick Shores does not play by those rules. The Asian influenced menu is well constructed, the Pacific is doing its thing just beyond the glass, and the room is louder than ideal at peak hour. Book early, sit near the window and let it wash over you. The kitchen earns the setting rather than coasting on it.

Try spanner crab fried rice, XO butter

Etsu Izakaya Mermaid Beach

Possibly the most reliably good Japanese food south of Fortitude Valley and north of Sydney. The Gold Coast does not deserve Etsu, and Etsu does not need the Gold Coast to endorse it. The sake list is longer than most people's attention spans. The robata grill does the sort of work you stop talking through, which at a Gold Coast restaurant is genuinely unusual.

Try Robata grilled chicken thigh, tare, sesame

Norté Gold Coast

Latin flavours done with actual rigour. The kitchen swings through Mexico, Peru and the Andes without feeling like a geography lesson, and the aji amarillo shows up in various forms across the menu, always earning its place. The room has energy in the way good rooms do. It comes from the kitchen and works outward. Not the Gold Coast you expect.

Try slow cooked short rib al pastor, aji amarillo, pineapple

EDDY + WOLFF Robina

Nobody expects much from Robina, which is probably why EDDY + WOLFF is so enjoyable. It keeps its head down, feeds its regulars properly and made OpenTable's national top 50 in 2025 without making a fuss about it. Neighbourhood dining in the most unpretentious sense of the term. Robina has a good restaurant now. This is news.

Pan roasted fish, beurre blanc, seasonal greens

Rickys River Bar and Restaurant Noosa Heads

The Noosa River at dusk is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, and Rickys is smart enough to know it. The food follows suit. Fresh seafood, local produce, things prepared in a way you could not really object to. Oysters, reef fish, blue swimmer crab. You eat well and the view keeps giving. The service knows when to talk and when to leave you to the river, which in Noosa is rarer than it should be. Its been doing this long enough for it to seem effortless and polished. It is.

Try blue swimmer crab, river butter, grilled sourdough

Humble on Duke Sunshine Beach

Fourteen seats. OpenTable ranked it among Australia's 50 best restaurants in 2025. The booking situation is, as you would expect, a minor ordeal involving refreshed browser tabs and a degree of forward planning normally reserved for overseas travel. Get in. The scale of ambition at this counter is considerable for a room you could mistake for a very serious person's dining room.

Try chefs counter tasting, market driven, changes daily

Sails Noosa Noosa Heads

Sails has been around long enough to have earned your scepticism, and consistently refuses to justify it. The kitchen takes Noosa's fishing and farming community seriously, the room is airy, the list is good and the reputation is maintained in the most boring possible way. Showing up and doing it properly every service. A reliable anchor in a town full of places trying too hard.

Try roasted reef fish, native herb butter, caperberries

The Long Apron Sunshine Coast Hinterland

Drive up into the hinterland past the macadamia farms until the road gets narrower than seems sensible. The Long Apron sits inside Spicers Clovelly Estate and operates somewhere between French classicism and Queensland seasons. The venison tartare with cured egg yolk is the kind of thing you stop mid conversation for. Worth every minute of the drive, including the bit where you wonder if you have the right road.

Try venison tartare, cured egg yolk, buckwheat crackers

Mapleton Public House Mapleton

A pub menu built by people who actually think about food. Falls Farm produce, Ten Acres sourdough, Shark Bay scallops, pub fare only in the loosest architectural sense. The dining room is the place you end up staying longer than planned, because nobody is rushing you and the next round is always a reasonable idea. Which is also a good sign in a pub.

Try Shark Bay scallops, cauliflower cream, crispy capers

Bar Deco Yandina

A former deco building on the main street of a small Sunshine Coast hinterland town, which is either a very good or very bad sign depending on your experience of such places. Here it is a good sign. The wine bar is taken seriously, the small plates are well sourced and the whole operation has a looseness you do not find in city rooms trying this hard to achieve it.

Try charcuterie, local farmhouse cheese, pickled stone fruit

Sopra Cucina & Bar Bli Bli

Italian cooking done without shortcuts in a town most people drive through on the way to somewhere else. Bli Bli is not a dining destination. Sopra is making a reasonable case for it becoming one. The pasta is made in house, the room is warm without being cloying and the regulars clearly know something the guidebooks are still catching up on. Follow the regulars.

Try house-made pappardelle, braised short rib, gremolata

Blume Restaurant Boonah, Scenic Rim

Jack Stuart cooked at Gauge and Congress Wine before trading Brisbane for the Scenic Rim, which is either good sense or an unusual career move depending on how you look at it. The menu is built around what is actually growing nearby, changes as the season demands and contains the kind of precision you would expect from a kitchen serious about chickpea cannoli and smoked Fassifern Valley beets. Make the drive. It is a good one.

Try smoked Fassifern Valley beets, Maffra cheddar, walnut

Essen Stanthorpe

The Granite Belt is Queensland's cold climate secret, which locals prefer you not mention too loudly. Essen is its best dining argument. A set menu built around the region's growers and shaped by whoever brought something interesting to the back door this week. The room is unhurried and the food follows. Stanthorpe rewards patience, and so does Essen. Oh and the wine list is bloody smart.

Try Granite Belt lamb, seasonal vegetables, apple cider jus

Host Dining + Wine Bar Toowoomba

Thirty four seats in the middle of Toowoomba's CBD, not a sentence you would normally end with "and it is excellent." Host has built a devoted following on a simple idea. Change the menu constantly, buy from good people and edit the wine list with genuine opinion rather than distributor relationships. The "just feed me" format is the right call. Take it.

Seasonal tasting, chef's selection, changes weekly

Beaches Cafe & Restaurant Yeppoon

The Capricorn Coast is not somewhere you'd normally detour for dinner. Beaches is the reason you should. Locally caught seafood, a kitchen with no interest in overworking its ingredients and a room with the kind of focused calm you'd associate with somewhere much harder to get a table at. Rockhampton is an hour away. This is why you stop at Yeppoon instead.

Try Coral trout, Capricorn citrus, herb oil

Tartine Boulangerie Bistro Hervey Bay

Hervey Bay is known for whale watching and for being the gateway to K'gari. Gourmet Traveller recently noted the town's dining scene with some surprise, and Tartine is part of the reason. The sourdough is serious, the bistro food is French adjacent without being laborious about it and the morning service alone justifies a stop on the coast road north. The whales are optional. The bread is not.

Try country sourdough, cultured butter, house-cured salmon

Deja Vu Restaurant Airlie Beach

Airlie Beach has no shortage of places to eat after a day on the reef, and most of them are fine if loud is what you are after. Deja Vu operates at a different register. The menu is restrained and reef aware. What came off the boat this morning, how best to treat it. The room is calmer than its postcode suggests, which in Airlie Beach is an achievement in itself.

Whitsunday reef fish, coconut and lime leaf broth

Sorbello's Mackay

Mackay is sugar country, roughly two thirds of the way up the coast and not a dining destination... yet. Sorbello's has been holding the line for serious Italian cooking here long enough to have outlasted most of its sceptics, which is the most honest form of credibility. House pasta, local produce, a kitchen with no interest in trend chasing. A good restaurant in a city learning to expect them.

Try House-made tagliatelle, local mud crab, brown butter

A Touch of Salt Townsville

Townsville is a city with serious ambitions and A Touch of Salt is part of what is making those ambitions credible. It made OpenTable's national top 50 for 2025, which is not a small thing for a room this far north of everything. The cooking is precise and locally grounded, using the produce of the tropics without reverting to coconut everything cliche. A benchmark for what north Queensland dining can be.

Try North Queensland barramundi, native herb crust, reef salad

Nu Nu Palm Cove

Nick Holloway has been running Nu Nu in Palm Cove long enough for the palms to have grown around it. The food is inventive in ways far north Queensland produce makes possible and nowhere else quite does. Daintree chocolate, Davidson plum, finger lime. Tourism Australia lists it. The scepticism you bring because of that dissolves somewhere around the second course and does not come back.

Try miang of local produce, finger lime, native leaf

Ochre Restaurant Cairns

Ochre has been using native Australian ingredients as a serious culinary proposition since before it was the sort of thing kitchens put on their marketing materials. Crocodile, kangaroo, Davidson plum, lemon myrtle, all used because they belong here, not because they read well in a press release. A consistently good Cairns anchor, not a tourist trap, which in Cairns takes some doing.

Try crocodile fillet, Davidson plum reduction, bush herbs

Jungle Fowl Cairns

Thai food in the tropics makes complete contextual sense, and Jungle Fowl executes it with the heat tolerance and herbal honesty you would hope for. Gourmet Traveller called it vibrant, which is accurate if understated. The larb is real, the chilli levels are not adjusted for southern sensibilities and the room is lively in the way good Thai restaurants are. Deliberately, productively loud.

Try larb gai, toasted rice, fresh herbs, genuine heat

Bam Pow Port Douglas

Port Douglas attracts a certain kind of diner who has arrived by resort shuttle and wants their Asian flavours smooth and inoffensive. Bam Pow is not for them, which is what makes it worth going to. It earned a national OpenTable listing in 2025 by doing something with South East Asian cooking involving real conviction rather than real restraint. The town is small enough and the room loud enough that word gets around quickly.

Try betel leaf, prawn, toasted coconut, tamarind caramel

Harrisons Restaurant Port Douglas

The most consistent fine dining room in Port Douglas, which is a quieter claim than it sounds given the competition. Spencer Patrick's kitchen has been here long enough to have a point of view and local enough to know who is growing the best produce within an hour of the pass. The tasting menu is the right format for the room and the region. Order it and stop second guessing yourself.

Try Port Douglas reef fish, Daintree ginger broth, pickled choko

Felix Marrow eats on his own dime. No restaurant reviewed here was contacted in advance.