The pulled pork shank is covered by a single rape leaf that's been slow cooked in burnt butter. You can see every vein in the dark green, heart shaped leaf, which is just as the creator of the dish, chef James Viles, intended.
"The word garnish, I hate it," says Viles. "Five years ago when we started, that dish would have had another three or four elements on top of it it. I'd have said, 'I have buds in the garden, I want to use them'. But restraint is everything now."
Viles has not only refined his offering since opening Biota Dining at Bowral in the NSW Southern Highlands in 2011, he's also built it. What started out as a degustation-style restaurant is now a degustation-style restaurant with hotel attached. There are also workshops and events, the obligatory cookbook, and a bar serving cocktails and food that's a million miles away from a greasy hamburger and fries.
As it happens there are wagyu cheese burgers and hand cut fries on the menu, but also tuna belly on toast with preserved limes; duck with carrot marmalade on rye; and pea, mint and labneh salad. G&T; drinkers have the difficult choice of earl grey gin with tonic and wild botanicals, or pepperleaf gin with cucumber, basil and soda.
Viles is one of several ambitious chefs who've eschewed life behind the pans in a big city restaurant in favour of setting up on their own in regional Australia. There's a long-standing international precedent for it. Think Thomas Keller's The French Laundry in California's Napa Valley; Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck at Bray in the UK; and Spain's El Celler de can Rocca and Mugaritz, neither of which are in Madrid.
Closer to home, Lake House and Provenance have long lured foodies to the Victorian towns of Daylesford and Beechworth respectively. Dan Hunter put Dunkeld on the culinary map when he started cooking at the Royal Mail Hotel in the late-2000s; and while Hobart isn't strictly in the regions, the fabulous Garagistes was the forerunner to David Moyle's Franklin in helping to convince culturally minded mainlanders that there's more to do there than visit MONA.
What's changed in recent years though is the quantum of such restaurants springing up around Australia – and the quality, of both the chefs behind them and the dining experiences they are offering. Many trained in those revered offshore Michelin-star establishments before returning home, inspired and determined to make their mark.
The new-era, top-flight regional Australian restaurant will likely have a degustation menu featuring hunted, foraged and lovingly home-grown ingredients. Anywhere from five to 10 dishes will be artfully served on artisanal crockery, matched with wines from interesting boutique producers, all delivered by friendly, well informed staff who belie the notion that a high-end restaurant means snooty service.
The AFR Australia's Top Restaurants tell the story, with 15 of this year's 100 best restaurants located outside of mainland capital cities. They include Dan Hunter's three-year-old Brae, voted the second best restaurant in the country. Hunter, who left the Royal Mail in 2013 to set up Brae, was also judged best chef in the 2016 awards. His was also one of only four Australian restaurants on the 2015 world's 100 best restaurants list – the others being from cities, namely Melbourne (Attica) and Sydney (Sepia and Quay). Brae made the 2016 list, too, coming in at 65th.
"I call it an art project," says Hunter of Brae, situated in a farmhouse at Birregurra in Victoria's south-west. "I won't take away the need to make money – when you've worked for so long and you put your whole life into something it does need to make a return. But first and foremost we try to make it amazing. After that, if we can make money, it's beneficial."
Two newer restaurants, Fleet in Brunswick Heads and Igni in Geelong, also made the Top 100, some achievement given each was less than a year old at the time of the May awards.
What's driving this crop of owner-chefs into the regions? For many it's about getting closer to the source of ingredients and having the freedom to create the dishes and restaurants they've long dreamed of without the outlay a capital city site would require. It's also about finding a balance between working like a dog and having some semblance of a life.
"I wanted to come to work every day and look at trees," says Viles, who still averages 80 hour weeks. "It's important to me to have a connection to the outside. I don't feel relaxed enough in a city to cook in this kind of free-form way."
Turning that desire into a viable business would have been tricky before the macro-trends of recent years, from an increasingly food-literate – nay, obsessed – population to a culinary tourism boom that's spawned couples who think nothing of dropping $1000 on a meal and weekend away. The social media revolution is playing its part, too, allowing chefs in far-flung places without big marketing budgets to keep their Instagrammable dishes in the public eye. Brae has nearly 24,000 followers on Instagram, Biota 10,000-plus.
In 2014 Tourism Australia got on board, launching a campaign to promote the nation's restaurant credentials. The realisation? Cashed-up foodies spend a lot more per day than backpackers who just want to surf Bondi Beach.
The trend towards top-notch regional restaurants fits, too, with population shifts, in particular the arrival in coastal towns of city types looking for cultural offerings to augment their sea- and tree-change lifestyles. Fleet in Brunswick Heads and Paper Daisy at Cabarita Beach cater to people living in northern NSW as well as those from Brisbane and Sydney with beach houses in the area. Add in tourists who like the idea of a weekend in relaxed and beautiful environs and you have a broad trio of population pools from which to draw.
"More and more regional centres are viable for high income earners in terms of the lifestyle they offer," says economist Tim Harcourt from the University of NSW. "Food and dining are a big part of that."
BIOTA DINING
Bowral, NSW
Established: 2011
Chef and co-owner: James Viles
If James Viles was running a restaurant like Biota Dining in Sydney, he reckons he'd have 30 to 50 different suppliers. In Bowral, a 90-minute drive from the NSW capital, he has three. "City restaurants are very reliant on their suppliers. We're really not," says Viles. "We have three suppliers: one for meat, one for seafood, and a guy who gets all my fruit and veg from local farmers. The rest is either wild, grown on site or brought in by local growers."
Viles and his team go foraging for ingredients three to four times a week. He and his sous chef also bow hunt, supplying on the odd occasion the deer and kangaroo on the menu. "I would much rather take what we need from the wild as we need it than have animals in stressed out environments at an abattoir," he says. "We only hunt on private property, in season."
What they find whilst foraging, what they grow in their extensive kitchen garden and what comes unexpectedly through the door determines what they cook, with the menus changing every couple of weeks.
"The dessert last week was quince, this week it's been mandarins," says Viles. "Locals give them to me for free. One lady came in with countless chestnuts. The rape leaves came in with another local who asked if we could do something with them." He adds with a laugh: "The only thing I don't get for free is truffles."
Viles cooked at top restaurants in Europe and the Middle East before returning to the place of his childhood to set up Biota Dining with his father. He was only 30, but highly ambitious from the get-go.
"Dad and I wanted to create a restaurant in regional NSW that people had to get in a car and drive to," he says. "As a young chef I didn't know that Napa Valley was in California, but I knew it was home to The French Laundry. That was important to us. We always had destination dining in mind."
Most diners from outside Bowral
The first year was "fairly dismal" but Viles estimates visitor numbers have quadrupled since then to about 30,000 covers a year. It's helped to have a casual bar offering – "that's really important in a regional restaurant, not everyone wants to drop big cash on dinner" – and a book that's sold overseas and here.
But the biggest difference came two years in, when they took over the 1950s motel next door and renovated it. Diners can now choose to stay in one of the dozen rooms on the property rather than risk drink-driving to nearby accommodation. "We were five days a week before that, now we're seven.Weekends are full two to three months out, and in winter they really ramp up."
Viles sounds a bit amazed as he reels off the configuration of his 30-odd staff, which ranges from a kitchen brigade of nine and floor staff of 15 to housekeepers, gardeners and a full-time forager. "I've had to learn about room inventory, room checks."
He estimates that about 95 per cent of diners come from outside of Bowral, 80 per cent from Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, and 15 per cent from overseas. "We get people from London, New York, Chicago."
One thing he's been disappointed with is the lack of support from local tourism bodies – and local diners. "They don't come," he says simply. "It always happens with regional restaurants that are trying to push the boundaries. It's not just in this country, it's every country. It used to really bother me. I'd be gardening and an old couple walking their dog past would say, 'Are you still here? We thought you'd be gone by now.' Dad just said, 'dig your heels in even harder.'"
Noma's Rene Redzepi visited Biota during his time in Australia, bringing with him journalists from around the globe. He went foraging with Viles, after which an article appeared in France's Le Monde. A friend suggested Viles print it out and display it in the restaurant but he's not in favour of it.
"If you start doing that you lose sight of what you're doing. I've seen it happen. At the end of the day, we're just cooks."
In his case, a cook with a burning desire to put the best of his region on a plate. "I've been through regional Spain and Italy and in each of them there are restaurants that are really focused on what the region stands for," he says. "What does the world know about Australia's regions? It doesn't. Some of Paris at least now knows about Bowral."
He might be overworked but Viles has lost none of the ambition he had five years ago. "I want to have a French Laundry, something that's here forever. That's a big name to throw around and we're not in that league, but they started somewhere, too."
BRAE
Birregurra, Victoria
Est: 2013
Chef and co-owner: Dan Hunter
When Dan Hunter decided to leave the Royal Mail Hotel to set up on his own, he and wife Julianne Bagnato drew a 150-kilometre ring around Melbourne. They then created a list of what they needed to turn their long-held dream into a reality.
"It had to be on the edge of a town but not in one, close to the coast but not on the coast, on a small property that was big enough to grow food but not so onerous as to be a farm, and it needed an existing building that could be renovated to suit our needs," says Hunter. "It had to be in a good agricultural area, with good roads, but have none of the council problems that come with being on land zoned agricultural."
It took four years, during which time they got so depressed at their lack of luck they considered buying a caravan and touring the country instead. But in 2013 they finally found what they were looking for: George Biron's Sunnybrae, a restaurant and cooking school set on 30 acres at Birregurra, a town of not quite 700 people on the way to Colac.
After a four-month renovation, which involved extensively remodelling the property's farmhouse into a 45-seat restaurant, they opened for business. Hunter, who had worked his way up to head chef at Mugaritz in Spain before his time at the Royal Mail, already had a stellar reputation, and Brae was a star from the get-go.
It's not hard to see why. The restaurant has a winning combination of sublime food, contemporary decor and fantastically warm service, in a farmhouse that by its very nature means there's none of the stiffness that infuses so many top-end restaurants. "It's a personal offering," says Hunter.
The warmth hits you the moment you walk in, when the first thing you see is an extensive array of liquor bottles – dozens of them, from boutique gins and whiskies to all manner of liqueurs. It suggests design flair and says to those who've driven the hour and a half from Melbourne: you're here.
"I want people to take a breath out, feel almost that zen feeling of being able to relax because they're in a place of beauty and abundance," says Hunter.
Not a quick buck
That might be the feeling conveyed but it requires plenty of furious paddling below the surface. The owners have to pay freight for everything and work seven days a week. Then there are the farm issues: they planted 300-odd fruit trees and inherited an olive grove, from which staff hand-pick olives to make olive oil. The hot summer just gone was hell. "We had to buy 200 metres worth of hoses and water the trees with mains water this summer just to keep them alive. We've spent a fortune growing organic food for our customers over the past year."
He's thankful that his two other investors, Melbourne property developers Damien Newton-Brown and Howard McCorkell, are not in it for a quick buck. Hunter estimates the business cost about $500,000 to get off the ground and that he needs 30 of his 45 seats full to break even each sitting.
"The business model revolves around it being one of the best restaurants in the country," he says. "I watch things very closely. We don't outsource the finances. Everything is done between Jules and I, from human resources to writing the menu. It's about being really close to what we do."
Earlier this year they added six luxury guest suites to the property, fitted out with record players and a carefully curated vinyl collection, a cocktail bar, deluxe bath, underfloor heating and brekky in the morn. They had planned to do it at the three- to five-year mark but perceived a gap in the market and were in a position to do it earlier.
"It's made a big difference to the numbers we do on Thursday nights," says Hunter. "It was one of the quieter services, now it's 30 customers every Thursday. Even if it's only 20 people, the rooms are still full. That's great for cash flow."
Brae's inclusion on the World's Best Restaurants list means there are international visitors at nearly every sitting. "Guys who live in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, they might be here for work or on a working holiday and they'll do Attica, Quay and us," says Hunter. "Then there are the children of billionaires who have the luxury to go to these top restaurants around the world as hobbies. They'll fly in from Singapore on a Friday night, hire a car at Melbourne airport, come here for lunch on Saturday, do another top restaurant on Sunday and fly home on Monday morning."
Those who query the cost – $190 a head and an extra $125 for matching wines – don't appreciate the expense involved, Hunter says. "We're the cheapest three-hat restaurant in Australia and we probably have the highest cost base," he says. "If the dining public want these types of businesses to exist, they should think of what goes into them."
IGNI
Geelong, Victoria
Est: 2016
Chef and co-owner: Aaron Turner
Igni is located down a quiet, nondescript backstreet in the heart of Geelong. Look through the sheer grey organza curtain and out the window as you're downing Aaron Turner's sensational food and you'll see a factory wall and roller door. But don't tell Turner that makes it very "Melbourne".
"I hate it when people say, 'oh it's in an alleyway, that's very Melbourne'," he says. "It's not, it's just very urban. There are alleyways everywhere. The thing we liked about this place was the light. And I like being tucked away and not in your face – if you want to find us, you'll find us."
Turner cooked overseas, including at Noma in Denmark and El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, before opening the award-winning Loam in Drysdale, half an hour from Geelong, in 2009. After closing Loam in 2013 he took off again, this time to Nashville in the US, where he cooked for a couple of years before returning to Geelong when his two front-of-house friends from Loam, Jo Smith and Drew Hamilton, asked if he'd like to open a new restaurant with them. "I just felt I wasn't finished here," Turner says of returning to the region.
The trio initially wanted a 60-seat restaurant but the space they found dictated that it seat only 30, with a maximum of six per table. It took nine months to get Igni up and running, in which time Turner partnered with others to open a couple of Nashville-style hot chicken shops in Geelong. He's still involved with one of them. Like James Viles with his bar food, Turner likes having both ends of the dining spectrum covered; chicken wings at the Hot Chicken Project for $16, or a five or eight course tasting menu at Igni for $100 or $150 respectively. "I like having two different price points," he says.
While the Hot Chicken Project has pumping music, a long bar with stools and a cool dude vibe, Igni's aesthetic is all polished concrete, Scandi-esque wooden tables, sparkling glassware and earthen crockery. What it shares with the Hot Chicken Project however is a modesty that belies the quality of the food; a firm lack of pretension. That sensibility runs from the humour in the title of the cheese course – "old ewe, new ewe" - through to the coffee.
As Hamilton explains, turnover in a small restaurant like Igni was never going to be high enough to justify a top coffee machine. Rather than buy a substandard one, they asked their mates at Geelong's Cartel Coffee Roasters – located only doors away from the Hot Chicken Project – to find them the best filtered coffee maker possible. The resulting machine was imported from Oregon.
'Season' a 'shitty' word
When it comes to what and how he cooks, just as James Viles hates the word garnish, Turner has a thing about the over-use of the "seasonal produce" concept. "Season is such a shitty word, it really doesn't exist to me," he says, pointing out that he was still serving figs in April and tomatoes in May, way past their usual finish dates. "I'm getting great tomatoes from a guy who's playing around with a home-made hothouse. He's growing an Amish red tomato, the parent of the Roma tomato. He's not growing it in bulk, he's just doing it as a hobby."
What he uses in his restaurant reflects not what's in season in the broadly understood sense but what his friends and suppliers give him. "There's a lady with a beautiful garden in east Geelong who keeps some bees. She turned up one day with two trays of burr comb, which is like unfinished honeycomb," Turner says. "I haven't tasted anything like it in my life. Suddenly we had two or three dishes with it. You don't get that kind of quality in the city, and you don't get it for free. I chatted to her and found out that she has all these other things, too."
Igni is open Wednesday to Sunday but Turner's ambition is to cut back a day. It's closed for a two-week winter break, a bold move that also speaks of his determination to do things differently. "I want to change the thinking in hospitality that your life's over. It doesn't have to be."
Victoria's second biggest city, Geelong is morphing from a manufacturing economy heavily reliant on Ford and Alcoa into one driven by medical and educational businesses, high tech companies and clothing retailers such as Cotton On. It has a growing Melbourne commuter population, too.
"It's like a teenage city, it's growing up," observes Turner. And a growing city in 2016 deserves a kick-arse restaurant. "We hear a lot of, 'thank you for doing something like this for Geelong'. I don't think you need the 'for Geelong' at the end."
FLEET
Brunswick Heads, NSW
Est: 2015
Chef and co-owner: Josh Lewis
Watch Josh Lewis in action and you get the impression he doesn't do anything that isn't deliberate. With a pair of elongated tweezers, he places every lau-lau flower, every piece of crispy mullet skin, every winter pea, exactly where he wants it on the plate. It's a concession to the tiny kitchen in which he works, but also suggests a mind for which precision is paramount.
How funny then that Fleet, the culinary venture he launched a year ago with partner Astrid McCormack, happened almost by accident. A holiday in Byron Bay led to them heading north in 2013 after the closure of Loam in Victoria, which McCormack co-owned and where Lewis was sous chef.
A lack of affordable housing in Byron took them to Brunswick Heads, some 15 kilometres further up the coast. An Italian restaurant giving up the lease it had held for 20 years came to their attention via a friend opening a homewares shop next door, culminating in the "absolute serendipity" of where they find themselves today.
The result is a high-end eating experience in a town where eating out means putting on your good thongs. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it hole in the wall, Fleet is all clean lines and pinewood accents. It's as if a Danish designer crept in under the cover of darkness, kitted out Fleet and scooted back to Copenhagen.
Kitchen and restaurant are essentially one room. A wide concrete bench runs down the restaurant's centre, with diners propped on one side while McCormack, Lewis and their bar tender Rob Mudge toil on the other.
The maximum they can seat at any one time is 15. "Sometimes we'll do two-and-a-half sittings a night, and we could do more," says Lewis. "But we find 35 to 40 diners a night is probably optimal for what we want the restaurant to be, and in terms of our operating limits."
Off the beaten track
The location helps to keep costs low. "Rents in Brunswick are definitely lower than in Byron, where they're astronomical by comparison," he says. "Being off the beaten track also means people have to seek you out, which has definitely helped our business model."
The produce is all sourced locally, be it from the farmers' markets at nearby New Brighton and Mullumbimby, a pig farmer in Bangalow or from Craig "Freckle" Gream at Byron Bay. And there's hardly a day when Lewis doesn't have someone knock on his door proffering an obscure flower, vegetable or cut of meat.
To watch him prep each dish is mesmerising. Every dollop of black garlic emulsion, every spray of dill flower is placed with a flourish. There's an element of theatre to the whole thing which only enhances the dining experience. If you didn't know he'd trained under Shannon Bennett at Vue du Monde, you'd be sending him off for an obsessive compulsive diagnosis.
Sometimes when food is that fussy, it's all style over substance. But not here. Lewis's signature dish – smoked mullet, crispy skin potato and dill – is a winning symphony of flavour and texture. His cuttlefish, peas, green olive and macadamia is briny, like the sea. And the Ballina king prawns are brushed with a garlic butter and served with fennel pollen which pops in your mouth. Fleet is a product of its geography, and the peculiar micro-climate of Byron and its hinterland means Lewis is experimenting with exotic fruits he never encountered down south.
Bookings for the main service are snapped up a month in advance, largely by interstate gastro-tourists. Savvy locals know if they get there early, they can pick up a dish or two between 3pm and 6.30pm. "People on holidays tend to eat lunch late – so we've instituted a service at 3pm, which bleeds into the dinner service," says McCormack.
The whole enterprise is the happy beneficiary of the Byron ripple effect: the seep northwards of the more discerning members of the Byron crowd searching for something authentic. Right now, Fleet is the only hatted-restaurant on the block, but with the gentrification of Byron creeping out in ever-expanding concentric circles, it can't be long before they have competition. Do they plan to exploit their first-mover advantage and expand the premises?
"Leon Fink was in the other month," says McCormack of the restaurateur behind Sydney's Quay, Otto, The Bridge Room and Bennelong restaurants. "At the end of dinner, he sat Josh down and said we needed to work out how to knock through a wall. But unless I can clone Josh, we'll have to make do with feeding 15 people per service."
Additional reporting by Fiona Carruthers.
The AFR Magazine Food & Wine issue is out Friday, June 24, inside The Australian Financial Review.
