REGIONAL RESTAURANT
OF THE YEARBrae
Birregurra, VictoriaO
ne of Brae’s paddocks produced nearly six
tonnes of wheat this year, a successful fi rst
crop fi ve years in the making. The grain is
stored in a neighbour’s silo before being
brought, ute-load at a time, to the kitchen where it’s milled
in small batches and baked into bread in a woodfi red oven.
There’s never been a masterplan for Brae to become
self-su cient but every year chef Dan Hunter grows more
of the ingredients that will land on his restaurant’s tables.
And while the beehives, the ever-expanding vegetable
gardens, olive and citrus orchards, chicken runs and now
the paddock full of wheat might read as some kind of Bear
Grylls-style extreme restauranting, it’s less about fanatical
adherence to locavore ideology than it is a full-fl edgedcommitment to getting great ingredients onto the
plate. What Hunter does with these ingredients at
Brae is to refl ect the surrounding countryside in fl avour.
Whether they’re grown in the gardens or sourced from
nearby producers, the ingredients speak of the soil, air
and water of this rural-maritime region. It’s a detailed,
succinct, clever portrait that marks Brae as one of
Australia’s great restaurants.
Combined with an elegant dining room that still hints
at the restaurant’s farmhouse past, superb service from
a committed team and a drinks list in lock step with the
fl avours on the plate, Hunter keeps honing a singular dining
experience that reclaims the seasonal-regional cliché
from marketing mantra and reframes it as a way of life.