First there was the legendary vegemite curry served with flaky, buttery roti, and now modern Southeast Asian restaurant Sunda, is launching a new restaurant.

Located in the heart of Melbourne’s dining precinct in Little Collins Street, the new venue is set to open in the second half of 2020.

Diners can expect to get a delicious taste of history as owner-chef Khanh Nguyen draws on cooking techniques and cuisines from an era when first contact was established between Chinese and Southeast Asian seafarers and Indigenous tribes in northern Australia.

This was a time before Europeans arrived, when Asian-Australian maritime trade flourished and delicacies such as sea cucumber were gathered and traded to the far east, with rice, spices, tea, palm sugar and arak exchanged in return.

In any other chef’s hands, it might be a risky endeavour to reinterpret techniques and ingredients of the past, but knowing Nguyen’s brilliance for fermenting, smoking, curing, preserving, cooking over coals and hot sands, we can’t wait to see (and taste) the menu.

The new restaurant will be designed as an all-day gathering space, with a bar where diners can drop by for snacks and drinks. The interiors are a collaboration between Kerstin Thompson Architects and Figureground Architecture, who collaborated on Sunda, and blew us away with their unusual, brutalist industrial fit-out complete with exposed scaffolding poles.

The name ‘Sunda’ refers to the landmass that once connected Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, and we anticipate the new venue will have a name that similarly reflects its geographic influence

Sunda has been a hugely popular restaurant in the Melbourne eating scene and its beautifully-plated dishes are almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

But what we really love about Sunda is not only the delicious food, but the restaurant’s big heart. After the recent devastating bushfires, the restaurant donated proceeds from two sittings to the Red Cross, the Country Fire Authority and the Victorian Bushfire Appeal. And even better, they bottled their famous vegemite curry and donated 100% of the proceeds to emergency relief funds.

If the new venue has even half as much heart, we’re in for a treat.