Bistro Elba
100–102 Ocean Beach Rd, Sorrento VIC 3943 · $$$
A beachy, artfully dilapidated French bistro on Ocean Beach Road, twice-baked soufflé, ocean-trout gravlax, and a wine list built on small emerging French producers.
The Sorrento Ocean Baths are the kind of coastal detail that makes the Peninsula feel older and stranger than its current reputation suggests - a set of rock pools carved from the limestone at the bottom of the back beach stairs, filling and draining with the tide. On the right swell they are dangerous and on the wrong day they are empty, but on the right afternoon in early autumn they are one of the best swimming experiences in coastal Victoria.
Check the tides before you go. Low tide is the window. Don't try this in rough conditions - the surf side of the Peninsula deserves respect.
Combine with a walk back along Diamond Bay for the full back-beach loop. The light at the end of the day here is the Peninsula at its most cinematic.
Pair it with a booking
The best explore pages should lead somewhere next.
100–102 Ocean Beach Rd, Sorrento VIC 3943 · $$$
A beachy, artfully dilapidated French bistro on Ocean Beach Road, twice-baked soufflé, ocean-trout gravlax, and a wine list built on small emerging French producers.
5-15 Hotham Rd, Sorrento VIC 3943 · $$$
A grand old bay-facing pub-hotel whose best rooms still make Sorrento feel gloriously old-school.
111 Ocean Beach Rd, Sorrento VIC 3943 · $
An Ocean Beach Road institution that has fed generations of beachgoers, pies, pasties, custard scrolls, and a proper sourdough loaf.
Use it in a weekend
A two-night village-based plan that uses the tip of the Peninsula properly - back beach, national park, a village dinner, and the fort walk that turns the weekend into a landscape.
Keep going
Coppins Track runs four kilometres from Sorrento Ocean Beach through clifftop coastal heathland to Diamond Bay, following a route threaded with a century of local history. Interpretive signage along the way reads the landscape for you: the Peninsula's quarantine era, the military history of the area, the natural history of the heath. Diamond Bay is a small, almost-always-empty beach at the far end and an excellent turnaround point for a round trip. The track is more than a walk; it is one of the best ways to understand how this stretch of the Peninsula actually came to look the way it does. Coastal erosion, endemic flora, and the old paths between bays are all visible as you move through. Allow around 2.5 hours return. Best in the cooler months - the exposed heath gets hot in summer midday.
Open the guide →The Farnsworth Track is the Peninsula's most efficient clifftop-view-to-effort ratio: 1.5 kilometres one way between Portsea Ocean Beach and London Bridge, with dramatic Bass Strait cliff views at almost every point along the walk. Walk one way and return along the beach (tide permitting) for a satisfying short circuit, or push on west to Coppins Track for a longer day. This is the walk you do when you have an hour to fill and want the ocean properly in front of you. The track is well-formed, the gradient is forgiving, and the payoff comes quickly. London Bridge itself - a weathered limestone arch in the rock - is the natural turnaround point and worth the short detour off the main track. Good in almost any weather. The clifftop is exposed, so dress for the wind.
Open the guide →Point Nepean rewards people who are happy to walk a little further than the average Peninsula day-tripper. The road and paths out toward Fort Nepean unfold through old quarantine buildings, scrub, and cliff-edge lookouts before the whole place gives way to bunkers and artillery emplacements looking straight across the Heads. It is a history lesson, a coastline walk, and a very good excuse to leave Sorrento for the afternoon. Hire bikes if you want to cover more ground, but walking keeps the mood right.
Open the guide →Further reading
2 May 2026
Sorrento is the Peninsula at its most legible — limestone, tide, old money, and a main street that still works once the holiday theatre clears. Come in the off-season, stay two nights, and use it as a real town rather than a summer errand.
9 April 2026
The long lunches get the headlines. But the Peninsula's first hour of the day - the flat white, the croissant out of the oven, the eggs on a working bakery's sourdough - is the quieter, better-value half of the food story. Here is where locals go, and the order to do it in.
Where to eat