The tale begins in 2008, when Rodney Dunn – a former Tetsuya’s chef and Gourmet Traveller food editor – left Sydney with his wife Séverine Demanet to start a new life in Tasmania. Together, they launched a small farm and cooking school in a repurposed 19th-century schoolhouse in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley, a half-hour drive from Hobart. Fast-forward 16 years, and The Agrarian Kitchen has grown tenfold, now encompassing that cooking school, a takeaway kiosk and restaurant, all centred around a one-acre walled kitchen garden on the grounds of a former psychiatric hospital, in the small town of New Norfolk.
It’s a remarkable trajectory, one that has always been guided by a clear-cut purpose: to forge a more fundamental and holistic relationship with the food and drink in front of us. This rather lofty intention is so often used as PR puff to accompany locavore and farm-to-table narratives, but Dunn and Demanet are the real deal, possessed of the gumption to stick with it, as well as the patience to watch it blossom. And blossom their restaurant certainly has.
When the 60-seater opened halfway through 2017, in a light-flooded and high-ceilinged room, it cemented itself as one of the country’s great regional diners overnight. But now that it’s driven almost entirely by the adjacent garden’s riches, there’s an immediacy and aliveness to the experience that makes it feel vital. Together with head chef Stephen Peak, Dunn drives an elemental approach in the kitchen where process – whole-animal butchery, kefir-cultured cheesemaking, wood-fired cooking and smoking – is valued just as much as provenance.
What unfolds over a three-hour lunch here, isn’t the slightest bit pretentious. It’s a slow and steady salute to pleasures of the humble, understated kind: snacking on raw breakfast radishes smeared with celeriac miso in the back of a greenhouse, say, or relishing the purity of a plate of luscious red peppers dressed in their own vinegar. Nothing cries out for attention, but an unrelenting directness of flavour simply commands it till the very end, when boysenberry jelly petits fours appear.
The interiors of The Agrarian Kitchen Restaurant in New Norfolk, Tasmania (photo: Anna Ctrichley)
Factor in a laundry list of sustainability credentials, a young and largely local front of house team who’ve bought wholeheartedly into the vision and a peerless non-alcoholic drinks program that runs parallel to the Tassie-led wine list, and it’s no wonder the place seems more assured than ever. All these moving parts – much like the pickles, ferments and charcuterie out the back – take time to develop; when they do, the synergy is rare and undeniably rewarding.
The Agrarian Kitchen Restaurant
Australian
11A The Avenue, New Norfolk, Tasmania
(03) 6262 0011
Chef Rodney Dunn
Price guide $$$
Bookings Essential
Wheelchair access Yes
Open Lunch Fri-Sun
To see the full list of winners in this year’s Gourmet Traveller Annual Restaurant Awards, head over here.
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