Jamuan Melbourne is an independent reading room for Southeast Asian food in Richmond and across the city. We write about Malaysian cooking, Nyonya (Peranakan) dishes, the Thai and Indonesian flavours that turn up on local menus, and the pockets of Melbourne where you can find them. We are a guide, not a restaurant, and this site does not take bookings or sell anything. Think of it as the kind of notebook a food-obsessed local keeps: notes on dishes, streets, and the odd piece of restaurant history worth remembering.
Southeast Asian food covers a lot of ground. A Malaysian table might carry a dry, coconut-rich rendang next to a bowl of laksa built on a paste of chillies, shrimp and lemongrass, with sambal on the side for anyone who wants more heat. Nyonya cooking, the Peranakan tradition that grew out of centuries of Chinese settlement in the Malay world, adds its own layer: sour, coconut-based laksas, slow-pounded spice pastes, and sweets like kueh lapis and ondeh-ondeh. Thai and Indonesian dishes sit alongside these on plenty of Melbourne menus too, and the lines between them blur in exactly the way home cooking usually does. If you want the detail on individual dishes, our guide to Southeast Asian dishes worth ordering breaks down what to expect from a shared table, dish by dish.
Why Richmond
Richmond has been one of Melbourne's more interesting food suburbs for years, not because of any single big-name restaurant but because of the mix. Victoria Street carries the city's best-known strip of Vietnamese kitchens, Swan Street has built up a steady run of casual restaurants and cafes, and Bridge Road has shifted from a retail strip into a genuine dining destination over the past decade. Tucked among all of this, Palmer Street was home to JAMU, a Malaysian-leaning modern Australian restaurant that ran through the late 2010s and into the early 2020s. We go into the area in more depth, street by street, in our guide to Palmer Street and nearby dining precincts.
The JAMU story, briefly
JAMU opened on Palmer Street, Richmond, with a tagline built around the Malay word for a feast or gathering. It was a bustling, 70-seat room with copper fixtures and a dark, moody interior designed around a circular motif meant to suggest people gathered around a table. The kitchen mixed Malaysian technique with modern Australian plating: think sambal scrambled eggs at breakfast, cheeseburger spring rolls that reviewers kept mentioning, and a bottomless brunch format that drew a loyal weekend crowd. Like a lot of independent restaurants, it eventually closed. This site exists to keep a record of that history and to carry the conversation about the food itself forward, without pretending to be the restaurant that inspired it.
What you will find here
Alongside the dish-by-dish guides, we cover the formats that make Melbourne brunch and dinner culture distinctive, from bottomless packages to set lunches and banquet-style group dining. Our explainer on how bottomless brunch and dinner actually work walks through session lengths, drink inclusions and the questions worth asking before you book anywhere that offers the format. For broader reading on Malaysian food, Richmond's dining strips and the stories behind particular dishes, the food guides and dining updates section is the best place to start browsing.
We update this site as a small independent project, cross-checking facts where we can and saying plainly when we cannot confirm something. If you spot an error or have a correction, the contact page has details on how to reach us.
