Tasmania has a lot to garner a recom-
mendation to the curious hungry traveller:
a thriving restaurant and bar scene in
Hobart; abundant seafood (including
beautiful Bruny Island oysters); good wine
and smoky malt whisky; cheesemakers and
truffle hunters you can visit, who can then
cook a foraged dinner for you on the
beach. And because of its size and the
small number of self-selecting people who
have moved here, drawn by the bounty
and beauty of the place as well as its
low-key vibe, there’s a kind of can-do
enthusiasm that’s highly appealing to those
who like to travel and eat.
But why take the trip just for some culi-
nary kicks? Why, when the food world is
full of so many good places to eat, does it
matter that there are places doing things
differently, looking beyond the white
tablecloth, the tasting menu and the alle-
giance to a certain style of luxury dining? It
matters because more of us don’t want just
another great meal anymore — we’re
looking for a deeper, weirder connection to
the things we consume, the people who
make them and the cultures and traditions
behind them. We don’t want to just check
off entries on the year’s World’s 50 Best
Restaurants list; in this post-Bourdain
world, we increasingly want context, rele-
vance, excitement, fun. We want to take
home something more meaningful than
Instagram bragging rights and a signed
menu. Curious, informed diners are
seeking out restaurants where you can
really learn about the terroir of a place,
restaurants that double as culinary labs and
archaeological sites, and chefs who are
taking their talents outside the kitchen and
into the field — with mobile pop-up
dinners or chef-hosted tours that get you
cooking and seeing food in a multifacetedway. “People want a 360-degree view of
food culture,” says David Prior,
a globetrotting Brisbane-born, New York-
based journalist who has worked with
Alice Waters, and who just launched Prior,
a bespoke chef-and-sommelier-led travel-
lers’ club, in response to the demand.
“They want experiences that can’t be repli-
cated anywhere else.”
Tasmania, in its characteristically modest
way, is a testing ground for a new wave ofbeyond-the-bucket-list culinary tourism.
I went not merely to blow my mind with
Tassie tapas and brain-scrambling lights,
but also to sample another kind of experi-
ence — this one on a small family farm in
the lush Derwent Valley, where Rodney
Dunn and his wife, Séverine Demanet, run
The Agrarian Kitchen cooking school.
As you turn off the Lyell Highway onto
the twisty country roads that lead to Dunn
and Demanet’s domain, it’s impossible not
to be immediately soothed by the land-
scape: misty morning light in velvety
greens and big-sky blues; little cottages
and working sheep farms; hop fields;
leatherwood, oak and white-bark gum
trees. It’s the opposite of Turrell’s sensory
bombardment — a shock of calm — but
it’s equally invigorating.
Dunn trained as a chef in Sydney and was
once the food editor ofGourmet Traveller.
Like many urban-dwelling, food-minded
folks, he yearned to grow more of what he
cooked, to have the opportunity and space
to put into practice the ethos of sustaina-
bility and healthy eating he preached, and
to inspire others. He went to Tasmania for
the first time 10 years ago, for a magazine
story, and one look was all it took. He left
the city for five idyllic acres of fertile soil
that supported a berry patch, rows of heir-
loom vegetables, milk cows, geese and
ducks, some handsome goats and a family
of contented Wessex saddleback pigs
sniffing for acorns out back.
In their home, a converted 19th-century
schoolhouse, he and Demanet constructed
a big teaching kitchen with cream-coloured
wainscoting, a long centre island, a wood-
burning brick oven and a view of the vege-
table garden. Contributing to the cosiness
is a large hearth where the fire is stoked
all day long and a rotating menagerie of
culinary seekers
arrive to warm
themselves with
morning espressos
before the day’s
class in enlight-
ened country
living begins.
The Agrarian
Kitchen is a kind of transporting food tele-
vision show come to life. Dunn, a self-
taught farmer, is an exemplar of the fantasy
food life in the flesh. Jars of preserved
tomatoes line a shelf alongside a pot of
housemade plum vinegar. “We preserve
a lot,” Dunn says. “This year we did 400
kilos of apricots and about a ton of toma-
toes. So in winter we can really go to town.”
Along with nine others (holidaymakers
from the mainland who varied in kitchen“More of us don’t want just another great meal anymore
— we’re looking for a deeper, weirder connection to thethings we consume, the people who make them and
the cultures and traditions behind them.”JESSE HUNNIFORD/COURTESY OF FARO, MONA
ometime after the
cocktail of cold-
smoked Tasmanian
gin but before the
appetiser of pickled
walnuts and wallaby,
I was escorted from
my table at the
restaurant Faro up
glowing blue steps
and into a giant
ike a spaceship at the
teel and glass dining
room over the River Derwent.
Faro is a museum restaurant, but it’s
unlike any I’ve seen. For one thing, art is
not just seen before or after you eat: it
is central to the experience. Anchoring the
new wing of the wonderful and wonder-
fully weird Museum of Old and New
Art (MONA), 11 kilometres upriver from
downtown Hobart, Faro is reached via
a tunnel of shimmering light made by the
American artist James Turrell. The orb is
another of his creations. Titled Unseen
Seen, it is the latest and largest of his
‘perceptual cells’, spaces in which the
reclining viewer is encircled and over-
whelmed by a throbbing barrage of flashing
colours and sounds.
The wallaby? Tastes like kangaroo. The
Turrell — well, it baffled my senses and
flooded my brain with pure, unalloyed joy.
Here was dinner and a show I could get
behind, an immersive experience that effec-
tively obliterates the distinction between
gustatory and intellectual stimulation —
one in which, as the MONA website puts
it, you might “take your jamón Ibérico
with a side of neural battering”.
The exact nature of that battering is hard
to explain with any precision. As a New
York Times writer, equally flummoxed,
observed of another
Turrell work, “It is
difficult to say
much more about
the piece without
descending into
gibberish.” I can tell
you this: I booked
the Art + Dinner
program online before my arrival,
I checked the waiver warning that “artwork
may induce hallucinations, migraines,
claustrophobic seizures” and I emerged
from the orb 14 minutes later in a dazzled,
altered state, ready to ponder the meaning
of the universe, as well as whether to go for
a main course of grilled octopus and
eggplant or squid ink paella. I skipped
dessert and instead, like a child coming off
a carousel, begged to ride the Turrell again.