This little piggy went to market

The difference between dining out in Melbourne and Auckland is the style.

On the way to the Queen Victoria Market, Sonia, thin as a whippet, is talking, telling us where to get the best icecream (Trampoline, Brunswick St, Fitzroy) and where to find the best bread, a chocolate-and-cherry loaf, say, or anise-and-fig (Phillippa's, at the market.).

The day before I had wandered along the riverside at Southbank, in the 40C heat, licking drips of the best coffee gelato (Tutto Bene) from my forearm.

Young, chic women were all around me, many of them wearing black. Some of them were in that all-black uniform that young, chic women in Melbourne favour; others were in black shorts. These ones were running. Did I mention it was 40C?

There are two cities in the world where I have felt elephantine. The other is Hong Kong and you can make excuses there.

So, here's Sonia, who has now moved on to tell us where to get the best Greek food, the best pizza (try Ladro in Fitzroy), the best cakes.

I don't know where to get the best cakes because I was thinking about something else which would consume me for the rest of our Stuff Your Face trip to Melbourne.

Finally I blurted it. It may have come out sounding a little resentful.

"Why," I asked of Sonia, who seemed to know everything about food in Melbourne and was even seen eating quite a bit of it because I kept an eye on this, "are you so thin?"

"I run," she said.

We had a trot around the market which is a wondrous thing. I'm not sure you need a tour. I am sure you should do as the chefs do when they come early in the morning to pick up their supplies: have a sausage and sauerkraut in a bun at the famous bratwurst shop in the deli section.

The very first thing I did after we had checked in at the Langham - grand lobby, nice service, just do not attempt to remove the Melbourne Age Good Food Guide from the concierge as I did - was to go for a run.

I sprinted the great distance to the Southgate centre for two minutes in search of food. Well, they did say come to eat, and I was starving.

I've never really managed to work the Southgate centre out. It's an odd mix of commercial buildings at the back, and touristy rubbish at the front, with a scattering of trendy designer shops and trendy second-hand clothes shops (you know, cowboy boots which are just the thing to wear in 40C).

But Tutto Bene looked all right, in a touristy-overlooking-the-lazy-Yarra River sort of way.

It turned out to be terrific: a Tasmanian scallop risotto was the best risotto I've had since (food tosserism allowed here: this is a foodie story) Rome.

The waitress said, "Shall I bring you a tomato salad?" That seemed a reasonable idea, so she did.

A tomato salad turned out to be a dinner plate loaded with at least six perfect roma tomatoes, great slabs of buffalo mozzarella, and hearty sprinklings of tiny, salty mozzarella pearls. This would have done for dinner. But I was here to eat which is why I ran to the gelateria next door.

Admittedly, I didn't run very fast but then I had yet to meet Sonia.

Or Suzie Wharton who runs the chocolate tours. She is thinner than a whippet. I happen to think this is suspicious. Suzie has anticipated this.

"How can this skinny little runt be a chocoholic?" she asks. This is a rhetorical question. The answer to which is something about dedicating her life to the chocolate gods which means the calories drop off twice as fast. I didn't ask her if she runs; I didn't need to. A chocolate tour with Suzie is done at a swift trot.

We do Haighs, where we are offered a tasting plate of chocolate buttons and what taste like posh chocolate-coated jellybeans.

Suzie is not above slapping an eager hand: we must taste the chocolate in strict order from milk to dark to peppermint.

We do Koko Black, where we try their truffles and a chai chocolate. This chocolate is so good I will dream about it later. And berate myself for not bringing any home.

I blame Sonia and Suzie for this oversight. I also blame them for the fact that at breakfast at the Langham's Club Lounge I caught myself hovering, tongs aloft, over a doughnut. For breakfast. The bit I blame them for is that I put it back.

The choc tour could well be worth doing. I wouldn't do it again when it's 40C. And I still can't make up my mind if it would be better to do it with a fat person, or with skinny Suzie.

She is, though, very good on the historical buildings of Melbourne. But you can't eat those can you? Her book Spoil Yourself: A Chocoholic Guide is worth investing in (www.chocoholictours.com.au); it covers cake shops too.

I wanted to eat some Greek food. Actually, I didn't, having an abiding and no doubt irrational hatred of Greek food which is grey, greasy, slimy moussaka and those horrid, tough little octopi which people toss on the barbecue with some Mediterranean herbs - and which are about as tasty as rubber bands.

But Greek food is one of the things Melbourne is famous for and, ever happy to reinforce a prejudice, I went to Piraeus Blues with a British food writer.

This was not a popular choice with the hosts. The editor of the Good Food Guide, we were told, said she wouldn't take visiting foodies there. But Piraeus is one of those Melbourne institutions, so we went.

It's a big noisy barn of a place, with terrific service from smiley young things and it is entirely without pretension if also entirely bent on making the most of its reputation by charging much higher prices than the food deserves.

We didn't have moussaka. Was it on the menu? Hah! Was Retsina on the wine list?

We did have octopus so there was one prejudice stomped on like plates at a Greek wedding. This was no scrawny bit or rubber band. It had been one big mama of an octopus and it was tender and herby, a bit lemony and fantastic.

We had stuffed courgette flowers and some broad beans. All of this was very good. The mains cheered me up though.

No matter what you order (with the possible exception of the moussaka, although who knows?) mains come with a scrappy salad, a couple of dried-up roast spuds and a big slab of feta.

So that was Greek food. How affirming.

Melbourne can, of course, do much better then this, and it did.

I ate at Ezard at Adelphi, of which a lot of silliness is talked. The chef Teague Ezard is supposed to have pioneered a new style of food that bridges modern Australian with Asian inspiration.

Notwithstanding this pioneering business, Ezard is a great restaurant. I had the pork hock with chilli caramel and spicy Thai salad, a signature dish, and it was perfect.

I wanted to see what a top chef could do with a tired pud: cheesecake. Ezard does it with fromage frais and strawberry jelly and it bears not the slightest resemblance to those horrible things that come from factories. So you could call that pioneering.

So go, but do book. I left it late and couldn't get in until Sonia pulled some foodie strings.

We went to Taxi Dining Room at Federation Square, restaurant of the year in that guide which causes concierges to have a conniption should you ask to have a gander for 10 minutes.

We ate Wagyu beef (the breed of cattle the famous marbled Kobu beef comes from but bred in Australia) tataki, and spanner crab salad - with betel leaf and green tea noodles and much more of Taxi's Japanese fusion cuisine.

The food was memorable: light, bright flavours; crisp textures. And I couldn't help thinking that - and I thought this about most of the places we ate at - the difference between dining out in Melbourne and Auckland was not the quality or innovation of the food. It was the style of the thing.

We ate at some of the fanciest places in town and yet there was a casual pleasure to be had in the experience that is rare at home.

A lack of the aforementioned tosserism might be a coarse way to put it.

I had some very jolly foodie conversations with mostly very thin people. All of them took food very seriously; none of them were at all silly about it.

The guy who always, but always, has a can of duck fat in his fridge refers to Australian food guru Stephanie Alexander's book The Cook's Companion as the bitch. As in: "How do you cook brain fritters?" "Ask the bitch."

As we were leaving Taxi, a rather wobbly but very polite gentleman held the door open for us. He wasn't staff, he'd just had a very pleasant evening with his lovely wife at the restaurant.

The real staff minded not a jot. They had, she told us proudly, drunk three bottles of red wine between them.

After ushering us out of the place, he wanted to take the stairs; she wanted to take the lift.

"Take the lift," I said. "Let him take the stairs."

"Oh, I will," she said, tottering in after us, "I like being fat." What a wonderful woman.

The last day at breakfast I had the doughnut.

* Michele Hewitson pigged out in Melbourne as guest of Langham Hotels International.

Where to stay

The Langham Hotel, Melbourne, is on Southbank, in the heart of the foodie district. It's at 0800 858 662 or see links below.

Where To Eat

Ezard at Adelphi, 187 Flinders Lane
Taxi, Federation Square
Piraeus Blues, 310 Brunswick St, Fitzroy
Tutto Bene, Mid-level Southgate
Queen Victoria Market, 513 Elizabeth St