Nana Thai

Before anything goes on the grill you rub the dome with a block of pork fat, and as it renders it runs off the sides into the moat of broth that cooks everything else.

Why go

Nuttanan Lohayanjaree and Panta Thanapaisan met as postgraduate students in Melbourne, kept going home to Thailand for mookata, and could not find it here, so in 2018 they ran a dinner-only pop-up out of a carpark near Parliament that they shared with another restaurant (Broadsheet). The Bourke Street room opened in March 2020. Mookata is a grill and a hotpot in one piece of equipment, a golden dome with a ring of soup around it, fired by a portable stove at your table, and the laminated instructions walk you through it. Wan runs the kitchen from a mezzanine behind a market-stall facade; Mint works the floor. The stools and steel tables came from Thailand. The heat is not negotiated down for you unless you ask, and Mint's reason is straightforward: "For Thai people, if you're not gonna make it spicy then they won't like it."

Order this / avoid

• Order: mookata, obviously, and follow the pork-fat step. Moo joom if you would rather poach than grill, since the lemongrass broth takes pork intestine, neck, chicken and prawns. A som tum, chosen from more than a dozen. Deep-fried pork belly. Pink milk, made with salacca palm syrup, waiting on the table for when the chilli catches up with you.
• Avoid: arriving at the dinner rush with no plan, since there are no bookings and the line starts before the doors do. Rain and after 11pm are the two windows that clear. Do not wait for dessert; it is not served.

What locals & experts say

• Rushani Epa, Time Out Melbourne (April 2021): "Dessert isn't served but isn't necessary at Melbourne's first Thai hot pot and barbecue joint. And, if this is the first to grace our city, we're ridiculously lucky." ref
• Chynna Santos, Broadsheet (January 2022): "The pay-off is some of Melbourne's best (and spiciest) Thai food, including more than a dozen kinds of papaya salad, a crowd-pleasing tom yum with instant noodles and mookata, the signature hotpot-barbeque hybrid." ref
• Nuttanan Lohayanjaree, owner, on the chilli: "We want to do it authentically, that's why we stick to the authentic taste, which is spicy. If anyone wants milder or less spice, just let our staff know." ref
• No chef vote. All 74 Melbourne industry picks were checked on 1 August 2026 and none names Nana Thai. The hotpot and Thai rooms the industry does name are Lagoon Dining, Panda Hot Pot and M Yong Tofu.

Good to know

• Where: 169 Bourke Street, in the CBD, roughly 1.5km from MCEC at South Wharf.
• Booking: none taken. The queue is the system.
• Timing: dinner, and it runs late. Broadsheet's own advice is that a rainy day or 11pm are when the line disappears.
• Drink: Thai beer only, Singha, Chang and Leo, plus Thai milk tea and pink milk.
• Heat: spicy by default and warned on every page of the menu. Ask and the kitchen will pull it back.
• Currency caveat: the most recent dated coverage found for this room is from 2023, so confirm it is trading before you build an evening around it. No aggregator listing was used as evidence that it is open.
• Hygiene: Victoria publishes no consumer-facing food-hygiene rating, so there is no Australian equivalent of an FSA score to record.

Jeff's take (his words)

Nothing. Melbourne has no _src saved-places export in this repo, so no Jeff note stands behind this row. The master CSV's "queues past midnight" line overstates what the sources say, and is not repeated above.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

should-visit — You grease the grill yourself with a block of pork fat, and as it renders it runs off the dome into the moat of broth going around it, which is then what cooks your noodles and vegetables. That is mookata, and Mint Lohayanjaree and Wan Thanapaisan brought it to Melbourne because they could not find it here, first out of a shared carpark in 2018 and then into Bourke Street in 2020. Time Out's Rushani Epa reviewed it and finished by saying the city was lucky to have it. Broadsheet called the payoff some of Melbourne's best and spiciest Thai food. Fifteen or so papaya salads, deep-fried pork belly with thick crackling, Thai beer only, no dessert, no bookings, and a queue before the doors open. This is the informal, loud, cheap end of the ladder that Melbourne's list is short of. It holds at should-visit rather than must because the most recent dated coverage is from 2023 and no Melbourne chef in a 74-pick corpus names it.