Chef Dan Hunter left The Royal Mail in 2013 for the Victorian town of Birregurra, where he runs six chic suites with partner Julianne Bagnato. The rooms, with their heated slate floors, record collection and stunning views, are only available to diners in their destination restaurant. Brae is heavily influenced by the local region and the sea. Raw prawn comes wrapped in nasturtium leaf, there’s a fried parsnip dessert, and bread and butter that stands up to anything more elaborate.

If you don’t book one of the 12 rooms at James Viles’ Biota after you’ve had a meal there, you’re going to wish you did. Take everything the foraging, hunting, season-driven chef has to offer and then retire in a private room, only to try his sister restaurant Bertha’s Meats the next day. While Bertha’s is all about ethically-sourced meat – Nashville-style chicken wings, mortadella by LP’s Quality Meats, suckling pig, hot-smoked kangaroo – Biota is a polished, degustation affair. The rooms themselves are simple and minimal, a resting place to explore local Bowral and its surrounds, and dine as much as you can.

When the brand new boutique hotel Paramount House Hotel announced it would incorporate a restaurant and bar by Ester chef Mat Lindsay, the revitalised 1940s warehouse in Surry Hills became some of the hottest beds in town. The 29-room hotel includes tiny “nooks”, everyday rooms, and there are Mack Daddy rooms spanning four light-filled spaces including private balconies. But the food at the Poly is what we’re dreaming about most. A short rib with burnt honey and sugarloaf cabbage salad, and cheese dumplings with grilled onion soup, or pickled mussels with octopus. It’s more relaxed than Ester, but there’s still cooking over embers and smoke. We’d like to stay all day, and now we can do one better and stay for the night.

Automata, in one of the most exciting dining precincts in Sydney, bridges the gap between stuffy fine-dining degustation and casual dinner with a beautiful five- or seven-course feed in elegant surrounds. Owner and executive chef Clayton Wells brings communal tables, dark woods and twinkling lights to an impressive room with open kitchen and mezzanine level. It’s attached to the very cool The Old Clare, the 62-room boutique hotel that stretches across two iconic heritage-listed buildings. No two rooms are alike and the styles range from stylish and cosy to opulent and showy.

All-day eatery A1 Canteen by Clayton Wells is set on the ground floor of The Old Rum Store in Chippendale. Guests at The Old Clare can breeze across the laneway and into A1 Canteen for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfast and lunch spans XO omelette with blue swimmer crab and shallots, and a grilled mortadella and fried egg sandwich, a wild rice, poached egg and sweet corn rice bowl, and an iconic and highly instagrammable muffletta filled with whatever is good – think provolone, artichoke, red pepper, olive, pumpkin, braised greens and ricotta.

Jason Barratt (Attica, Circa The Prince, Hector’s Deli) is the new executive chef of this bright and idyllic dining room on Cabarita Beach. Sitting pretty beside the sunny pool in the stunning Halcyon House hotel, Paper Daisy caters a discerning, well-healed set looking for excellent eats north of Byron. Tiger prawn and bush tomato spaghetti, spanner crab with toasted walnut and kohlrabi, glazed fish with roasted turnip and buttermilk; the menu is fresh and inventive, pushing boundaries without being fussy. The rooms at Halcyon House are eclectic and individually designed by Anna Spiro.

The fine diner at Jackalope is as exquisite as the hotel deserves. Take caviar and martinis in your room (hell, the enormous bath if you like) to start the decadence, then saunter downstairs for marron with heirloom beans and bisque or john dory with seeds, jerusalem artichoke and vadouvan. The food is pitch perfect, immaculately cooked with a flair for fun and flavour. This is a sophisticated place, and it’s worth dressing up, and staying over, for.

There’s room for 90 tails, but Rare Hare is far from impersonal. The (slightly more) casual eatery – it’s more fun than a typical restaurant and more special than a cafe – looks out over Jackalope’s vine-laced hills. A wood-fired oven takes centre stage, setting the scene on the food. Executive chef Guy Stanaway brings something special to the large communal tables. Chive waffles with salmon roe and horseradish cream, charcoal eggplant with red miso and furikake, barramundi wings with almond skordalia and nduja butter, the food is of its place on the Mornington. We wanted to return again and again.

If we can judge a hotel by their breakfast, this is one of the country’s best. Stacked rye pancakes with caramelised banana, true story. But the five-course dinner tasting menu at in-house Long Apron is something to stay for. Start with smart snack and move on to buffalo tartare with cured egg yolk and black garlic puree and coal grilled duck breast with caramelised witlof. The hotel has slick service and caters to every whim. Expect spacious marble bathrooms, pretty linens and French-inspired interiors.

For 30 years the Lake House has been a quintessential country manor and its understated opulence makes it the perfect place for a long lunch and a short stay. Alla Wolf Tasker, champion of ethical, sustainable, seasonal eating and delicious. Produce Awards judge, ensures this is one of the best meals in the state. This is regional dining at its best. You might find kangaroo with mountain pepper sandwiched between flaxseed crackers, chestnut gnocchi with a ragout of forest mushrooms and truffled pecorino, Corner Inlet John Dory with Portarlington mussels, tomato jam and warrigal greens, or local plums with yoghurt parfait, farm sorrel and roasted plum sorbet. Lake House lies on the shores of Lake Daylesford, beside the Wombat State Forest with its abundant local fauna and mineral springs.

A Sydneysider’s escape from the city, Bells is part bush retreat, part beachy cottage. It’s the best of country, coastal and city chic, with a hotel and destination restaurant in one. The dining room and verandah overlook the pristine lawn, but all eyes are on the food. Skull Island king prawns come with brown butter and fried capers, there’s potato gnocchi with mild mushrooms, Aylesbury duck breast with pancetta and braised cabbage, and hazelnut brulee tart with compressed pear and hazelnut crumble. The rooms are chic white and blues, little cottages surrounded by native bushland. It’s idyllic and delicious here.

It doesn’t get much more Australian than this. This stunning dining room set in the Australian bush is like a panoramic glass viewing platform for Mount Sturgeon, setting the scene for the fit-out and what’s on the plate. The tables are made of solid stone and the room has an earthy, elegant feel. The food is Australian too, albeit with a foam, gel and almost molecular twist that takes us back a decade or so. But there’s roo tartare and an exciting array of things from the extensive kitchen garden. Take a meal, take a wander through the kitchen garden, then take yourself down a wooden boardwalk to your own room.

The Scandi rooms and Finnish sauna at Hotel Ohla make this boutique hotel in the centre of town a worthy visit, but Romain Fornell’s Michelin-starred restaurant makes this destination dining. The French cuisine has an avant-garde twist. Top tip: sit at the elegant bar and watch the chefs work the stoves while you eat, and make time for a cocktail on the hotel roof beforehand.

Iconic chef April Bloomfield handles the pans at The Breslin Bar and Dining Room, inside the Ace Hotel in New York’s midtown. The menu is everything you want an hotel restaurant to be, spanning country pork terrine, herbed Caesar salad, oven-baked three cheese sandwich with smoked ham, and chargrilled skirt steak with fried eggs and tomatillo salsa. There’s a tempura fried soft shell crab with broccoli rabe and parsley butter, and a 42-day dry aged ribeye for two. After a meal like this there’s nothing better than rolling back into your private room to relish and recover. Set on 29th Street in the former Breslin Hotel, the hotel itself has views of Broadway. The hotel boasts 260 guest rooms, many with vintage furniture and a utilitarian feel. The meal and stay together make a perfect New York experience.

Meat fruit, that chicken liver parfait encased in mandarin jelly, appears on the menu at Dinner by Heston and it’s become one of his most iconic dishes. Each dish here is inspired by historic British gastronomy, and the tipsy cake with spit roast pineapple is hard to go past. The hotel is iconically British, grand, and making the whole experience just so.