Idli With Fire-Grilled Carrots Just Won Australia’s Best New Talent Award
Gourmet Traveller named Saavni Krishnan and Aditya Suresh of Melbourne’s Saadi its 2026 Best New Talent, after three years of pop-ups arguing Indian cooking could run on Victorian produce.
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A meal at Saadi tends to open with an idli, the fermented and steamed rice cake, arriving under fire-grilled carrots and milagai podi, the South Indian powder of toasted lentils, chilli and coriander seed that usually sits beside a dosa. That one plate explains a good deal about why Saavni Krishnan and Aditya Suresh, the chef partners behind the Melbourne restaurant, have been named Gourmet Traveller’s Best New Talent for 2026.
The magazine announced its Restaurant Awards this week, in the year it marks 60 years in Australia, with the Best New Talent category presented alongside the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy. The useful part sits underneath the trophy: a mainstream Australian food title has put its rising-talent pick on a kitchen that cooks Indian regional memory through Victorian produce.
Saadi runs out of 18 Punch Lane in the Melbourne CBD, in the laneway building that housed the modern Southeast Asian restaurant Sunda from 2018 until January 2025. Krishnan and Suresh took the space for a three-month residency, extended it twice, then opened permanently on September 3, 2025. The name is a portmanteau of theirs. So is the cooking, and the line they used through the pop-up years said as much: Indian food, our way, beyond curry.
Who Krishnan and Suresh are
Krishnan was raised in Mumbai by a Punjabi mother and a Tamil father, which is its own argument against treating the north as the whole country. She cooked at Fred’s in Sydney and at Etta and Manzé in Melbourne, and in 2025 The Age Good Food Guide named her Young Chef of the Year while she was sous chef at Manzé. Sriram Aditya Suresh, who goes by Adi, moved around India as a child because his Tamil father was posted with the Indian navy, then ran the kitchen at Gemini, a wine bar in the northern suburb of Coburg. Between them they have years on Australian lines and a domestic map most restaurant menus never bother with.
The pop-up years did the development work. Saadi ran more than a dozen one-night dinners and residencies around Melbourne wine bars and small rooms, Hope St Radio and Public Wine Shop among them, and that is where the produce habits set. Ex-dairy goat became a signature: retired milking animals from Meredith Dairy, the Victorian farm better known for its marinated goat cheese, cooked because a seasonal kitchen can actually get them week to week.
What Saadi cooks
The rest of the card is regional without being a tour. Kadhi pakora, the yogurt curry with vegetable fritters, is served the way it works at home, with cumin-flecked rice to spoon through it. Corner Inlet flathead comes with pulikachal, a dark simmered tamarind relish, and curry-leaf chutney. Salli boti, the western Indian meat dish traditionally crowned with matchstick potatoes, gets rebuilt closer to a beef carpaccio with a blackened-lime dressing. Dessert can be barfi, the milk fudge, against a sour buttermilk sorbet.
The pattern underneath is consistent. Each dish keeps its own logic, its souring agent, its spice powder, its texture, while the produce comes from a few hours’ drive away. Halim Group, which also runs Aru and Antara in the city, owns the site and handles front of house; the chefs keep control of the menu and turn it with the season. The room kept Sunda’s industrial bones, with an open kitchen facing canteen-style rows, which suits a short menu and a kitchen that expects to be watched. The bar works off the same pantry, including a dirty Martini built on pickled green mango and a Marsala Negroni.
What the award means in Australia
Gourmet Traveller’s Restaurant Awards are among the few scoreboards Australian restaurants actually watch. Best New Talent goes to cooks who have already shown a point of view, not simply opened a door. The 2024 winner was Mischa Tropp, whose Kerala-focused Toddy Shop in Fitzroy pushed South Indian cooking into Melbourne small-bar culture before he closed it at the end of 2025 to build a new concept in the same space; 2025 went to Ozge Kalvo of Olympus Dining in Sydney. Krishnan and Suresh extend that line rather than repeat it. Tropp narrowed to one coast. Saadi works across the subcontinent and lets the season choose the plate.
Melbourne also took Best New Restaurant on the same night, for Yiaga, Hugh Allen’s room in the Fitzroy Gardens. The city has earned that clustering. Its South Asian dining runs from suburban specialists in Truganina and Dandenong to inner-city kitchens that decline the cream-gravy default: Helly Raichura’s Enter Via Laundry, which serves regional Indian tasting menus, the upscale Atta in Albert Park, and Tropp’s 150-seat Kolkata Cricket Club at Crown.
Why the recognition travels
For years, an Indian restaurant that wanted international credit had to earn it in London or New York. That is loosening. Australia has the small-producer networks, the wine-bar pipeline that lets young cooks test an idea cheaply, and now the awards habit to treat Indian food as local cooking rather than a category import. Krishnan and Suresh got there the slow way: a dozen pop-ups, a residency, then a lease.
What to watch now is whether the win changes the room. Best New Talent fills a diary fast, and Saadi’s argument depends on a short menu, small growers, and two chefs still cooking on the line. If the seasonal card keeps turning at that pace through a busy summer, the award will look less like encouragement and more like an early call.