Kata Kita

Restaurant · Melbourne, Australia

About Kata Kita

On a corner site at 266 La Trobe Street in the Melbourne CBD, Kata Kita serves modern Indonesian food built around Bali-style grilling rather than a broader survey of the archipelago's regional cuisines. The restaurant is listed by the City of Melbourne's own dining guide and has also been covered by Time Out Melbourne, Good Food, The City Lane and Hospitality Magazine, placing it among the newer additions to the city's Indonesian dining scene.

Its signature dish is babi guling, a whole-pig preparation associated with Bali in which the meat is stuffed with a paste of spices and aromatics, including turmeric, galangal and chilli, then slow-roasted for roughly five hours until the skin turns crisp and the flesh stays tender. The kitchen also serves bebek goreng Madura, a crisply fried duck dish finished with a black sambal sourced from the cooking traditions of Madura island off the coast of East Java rather than Bali itself, showing that the menu is not confined to a single region despite its Bali-grill focus. Alongside these centrepieces, the food and drinks list leans on citrus, chilli and lemongrass flavours across its small and large plates, and the restaurant also offers a cocktail list designed to accompany the spicier dishes. Dietary tags published by the restaurant include vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and dairy-free options, which is worth noting given how few Indonesian restaurants abroad cater explicitly to those diets.

The restaurant can be reached by phone at +61 3 7064 5389 or by email at [email protected], and operates its own website at katakita.com.au where gift cards can be purchased. Trading hours run from 11:30am to 3:00pm and again from 5:00pm to 9:30pm on Mondays through Thursdays, and continuously from 11:30am to 9:30pm from Friday through Sunday, meaning the restaurant closes its doors between lunch and dinner service only on the first four days of the week. Its location on La Trobe Street places it within walking distance of the State Library of Victoria and Melbourne Central, in a part of the CBD with a dense concentration of restaurants and bars. No information on halal certification or self-declared halal status was found for the kitchen, and given the prominence of pork dishes such as babi guling on the menu, the restaurant should not be assumed to serve halal food.

Address

266 La Trobe Street, Melbourne VIC 3000, Melbourne, Australia

Opening hours

Monday Thursday
11:30 AM - 3:00 PM, 5:00 PM - 9:30 PM
Friday Sunday
11:30 AM - 9:30 PM

Contact

Category

Indonesian Restaurant in Australia

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