Ellie Bouhadana is taking the old Claypots address at 213 Barkly Street, St Kilda, and turning it into Dafina Seaside Grill in early 2027, her first restaurant after Hope St Radio. The Dafina Seaside Grill St Kilda opening matters because Bouhadana is not entering a blank room; she and her husband, Rapha Tamir, are stepping into a site that Renan Goksin opened as Claypots in 1998, that Neelam Sami later carried from 2016, and that closed in February 2024 with 28 years of St Kilda memory attached to its bar, courtyard, and seafood habit.
According to Good Food, Bouhadana will open Dafina Seaside Grill after her time as the first chef at Collingwood wine-slash-listening bar Hope St Radio, where she took the restaurant to a hat in the 2023 Age Good Food Guide. That is the credential on paper. The more useful reading is craft-side: she built attention through food that could move between pop-up, event, bar counter, cookbook, and now a fixed pass.
Inside Dafina Seaside Grill St Kilda: Ellie Bouhadana's First Restaurant
Bouhadana's move into Dafina Seaside Grill St Kilda follows a period of motion rather than a straight line from one restaurant group to another. Good Food reports that she ran a summer seafood pop-up at Stokehouse's beachfront kiosk in St Kilda, then spent recent months in Morocco, Italy, and the Netherlands before committing to the Claypots site. She left Hope St Radio in 2024 and released Ellie's Table, continuing with events and catering in Australia and overseas.
The pattern matters because a first restaurant fixes a maker in a different way. Pop-ups let a cook adjust the room each time: a pasta party, a sandwich drop, a dinner with another host's glassware and another crew's station. A restaurant makes the questions daily. Who opens the kitchen? Who watches the bread? Who checks the fish? Who holds the pass when the owner is away? Dafina will force Bouhadana's food into repetition, service after service, and that is where a method either settles or frays.
Rapha Tamir is not a background name in this opening. The source identifies him as Bouhadana's husband and working partner on the project, and his family history with Claypots gives the handover a second line of memory. His grandparents went there for regular Friday spaghetti marinara lunches, according to Good Food, and he remembers long meals under the courtyard's bougainvillea. That detail ties Dafina to something older than a launch calendar. It puts the new restaurant inside a habit of St Kilda eating: seafood, looseness, family time, a room that people used before it had to explain itself.
From Claypots to Dafina: What Changes at 213 Barkly Street
The old Claypots room at 213 Barkly Street carries objects that are not neutral fittings. Goksin opened Claypots in 1998 with gumbos, chilli crab, and simple grills, according to Good Food; Sami took over in 2016, and the restaurant remained a rough-edged piece of St Kilda until it closed in February 2024. The new custodians are not keeping everything, but they are keeping some of what the predecessor pointed out.
Tamir has marked the bar as part of the inheritance, not a decorative afterthought. "He told me the bar is made from stolen pieces of the old St Kilda pier, so that's non-negotiable." said Rapha Tamir1 The sentence does useful work. It names Goksin as predecessor, the pier as material source, and Tamir as the person deciding what survives the fit-out.
Bouhadana's own claim on the site begins before she had a lease. "My parents brought me to Acland Street when I was a kid, for ice-cream, cakes and Luna Park. We came to Claypots, too. We couldn't let it be gutted, maybe turned into a KFC." said Ellie Bouhadana2 That is not nostalgia as branding. It is a local chef naming the rooms that taught her what a suburb felt like: Acland Street sweets, Luna Park, Claypots, the long meals and odd fixtures that made the place more than a tenancy.
Good Food lists some of those fixtures: canvas sails hanging from rope pulleys, carved seahorses as door handles, faux Sumerian tablets on the walls around one described as apparently real, and a large pressed tin octopus overhead. Those details matter because a restaurant opening in a former neighbourhood institution has two jobs. It has to make a clean enough break for the maker's own food to lead. It also has to know what not to sand back.
The Moroccan-Influenced Menu Taking Shape
Dafina is named for a Sephardi Jewish slow-cooked meat-and-grain dish connected to Bouhadana's Jewish Moroccan heritage, according to Good Food. The method behind the name gives the restaurant its first technical clue: an overnight cook in a claypot, held in the communal fire and finished in the embers as the heat dies. The point is not speed. It is retained heat, patient starch, meat and grain moving together until the dish can wait for the Sabbath table.
The early menu details run along that line of smoke, oil, cumin, bread, and fish. Bouhadana has named Moroccan-style brochettes, whole fish with cumin and garlic, lamb chops, dips and salad, oil and vinegar, and fresh-baked flatbreads for swiping. No one has published the dough formula, the grill setup, or the service format. Still, those dishes already tell a cook where the pressure will sit: seasoning meat for skewers so the salt reaches the centre, keeping whole fish moist while cumin and garlic mark the skin, baking flatbread close enough to service that it stays pliant on the table.
This is where the Hope St Radio years stay relevant. Bouhadana was the first chef there in 2021, in a room built around wine, records, and food that had to hold attention without behaving like a formal dining room. Taking that restaurant to a hat in the 2023 Age Good Food Guide gives Dafina a public marker, but the craft lesson is sharper than the award. She has worked in a setting where food, music, wine, and hosting had to share the same oxygen. At Dafina, the grill and the bread program will have to do that work inside a room with Claypots memory still in the timber.
For diners tracking Melbourne openings, the menu offers something more specific than a cuisine label. Brochettes, whole fish, lamb chops, dips, salad, oil, vinegar, and flatbread make a table built for hands. The dishes ask for tearing, swiping, passing, returning to the plate. If Bouhadana brings the discipline of her event work into a permanent kitchen, Dafina Seaside Grill St Kilda could become a place where the method is visible from the first order: fire, bread, fish, oil, and the timing between them.
Why St Kilda's Dining Scene Is Drawing New Talent
St Kilda is not being renewed by one lease alone. Good Food reports that Andrew McConnell 's Trader House will take over Stokehouse in spring, and that new developments are happening on Fitzroy Street. Bouhadana and Tamir's move onto Barkly Street belongs inside that same moment, but their project has a different grain. Trader House enters one of the suburb's best-known beachside addresses. Dafina enters a room where the predecessor's bar, octopus, and courtyard already carry a local script.
The suburb gives Bouhadana a set of associations that Collingwood could not. St Kilda means Acland Street childhood stops in her quoted memory, Luna Park, the beachside kiosk where she ran a seafood pop-up, and the Claypots table that her family knew. For Tamir, it means his grandparents' Friday spaghetti marinara lunches and the courtyard bougainvillea. Those are not broad claims about a dining precinct; they are the coordinates of two people choosing where to put their time on the tools.
What is at stake is the difference between renewal and replacement. A room like Claypots could lose its marks quickly: the door handles swapped, the bar removed, the ceiling cleared, the walls flattened into a safer surface. Bouhadana and Tamir are saying, through the pieces they keep, that the next restaurant can carry an older disorder without becoming a museum of it. The maker still has to cook forward. The predecessor still gets named.
For visitors, that makes the opening worth tracking in practical terms. Dafina will sit at 213 Barkly Street, not as a waterfront pavilion, but as a neighbourhood restaurant in a suburb where beach, music, old migrant foodways, and late-night memory often overlap. The early 2027 timing gives Melbourne diners a long runway. It also gives Bouhadana and Tamir time to turn the room from inheritance into daily service.
Opening Timeline and What to Watch Next
The confirmed details are spare and useful: Dafina Seaside Grill opens in early 2027 at 213 Barkly Street, St Kilda; Ellie Bouhadana is the chef opening her first restaurant; Rapha Tamir is working alongside her; the site is the former Claypots address; the food will draw on Moroccan influence and Bouhadana's Jewish Moroccan heritage. Booking channels, full team, hours, and final menu have not been published in the source material.
That absence leaves the right questions. Who will Bouhadana name as sous chef? Who takes pastry or bread if flatbreads become central to the table? Will the grill sit as the main station or as one discipline among slow-cooked dishes, salads, and dips? How much of the old Claypots room will remain when the doors open? Those are the details that will decide whether Dafina feels like a chef's first permanent home or simply a new sign on a remembered wall.
Watch the hands that gather around Bouhadana and Tamir before early 2027. A first restaurant is built by more than the chef whose name travels fastest: the prep cook who seasons the lamb, the person who bakes the flatbreads, the floor lead who decides how to carry the old pier bar into a new night. Dafina Seaside Grill St Kilda begins with a name, an address, and a predecessor. Its next test is the bench.
