skills and in the likelihood that they would
become back-to-the-landers), I have signed
up for the ‘Agrarian Experience’. An all-day
mix of pleasant conversation, gentle guid-
ance, hands-on kitchen prep, light lamb
butchery and communal eating, it’s less an
instructional lecture than an indoctrina-
tion into the earnest and engaged culinary
life, the pleasures and struggles of growing
good food and cooking it well.
We visit the pigs, peek into the smoke-
house, gawk at the purple cauliflower, sniff
the cardamom plants and take turns snip-
ping kale and pulling knobbly carrots outof the sweet-smelling earth. Wild green
parrots whiz overhead. In the kitchen we
break into teams and tackle the day’s work,
which in a few hours becomes our late
lunch. The menu, which changes for every
class, today includes tortellini stuffed with
pumpkin, breaded cutlets of lamb (waiting
to be cut off the animal currently hanging
from a hook at the front of the kitchen), a
winter salad of greens we just plucked, and
apple pie with ice-cream we’ll churn and
swirl with Dunn’s own walnuts.
“Rather than me breathing down your
neck at every step, it’s really nice just to doit,” Dunn says. “It’s a lot of work, but that’s
why you’re here. I’ve been to too many
cooking classes — and taught some in a
previous life — where someone stands at the
front and does all the cooking. Your mind
wanders. You never do any of it again.”
In teams of two we roll out the pasta
dough, shred cabbages for salad, bread and
fry the lamb and stuff our little pies. Over
the course of several happy hours, our
group of strangers cooks and talks together,
and a meal greater than the sum of our indi-
vidual skills comes impressively together.
In 2017, Dunn and Demanet opened
The Agrarian Kitchen Eatery, an incongru-
ously bright little restaurant on the grounds
of an abandoned 1920s mental asylum a few
miles’ drive from the farm. It has quickly
made a name for itself as the best restaurant
on the whole island. With its blond wood
tables, wood-fired grill, vaguely Scandinavian
vibe and thoughtful source selection, it’s the
kind of place that would make a splash in
Sydney or San Francisco. But the food is
distinctively, singularly Tasmanian: roasted
oca (a kind of root) with hot and sour
peanut sauce; an outstanding salad of
speckled cos lettuce with smoked wild eel
and paper-thin slices of smoked coppa (pork
neck), washed down with a glass of bracing
Meadowbank Tasmanian riesling.
That they’ve managed it here, in the
pioneer hamlet of New Norfolk, Tasmania,
is further proof of the allure of this place
— and an emblem of our desire to find
novel experiences that transcend tired ideas
of destination dining. Dunn and Demanet’s
place is remote and it’s good, but you
wouldn’t expect the meal of your life. It’s a
casual, happy place that’s best experienced
as part of a deeper exploration of the region.
“I don’t miss worrying about where the
next hot place is,” Dunn says. “We’re sort
of the antithesis of that.”
More than just the antithesis, they’re the
antidote to the idea that you must travel just
to say you’ve eaten in a particular restaurant.
In an era of so much culinary overstimula-
tion without context — and with the splen-
dours of the world a hashtag search away
— it’s places like theirs where we can find
real learning, adventure and inspiration, not
merely a passport stamped with highlights
of the gastronomic grand tour. The highest
distinction in the old Michelin guide was a
note that an establishment was “worth a
special journey”; now it’s the journey itself
that is the draw — one with as many
enlightening interactions and good tastes
along the way as possible.
mona.net.au; theagrariankitchen.comRadishes with whipped
trevally roe at The
Agrarian Kitchen
Eatery, New Norfolk.
ADAM GIBSON170 HARPERSBAZAAR.COM.AU April 2019
ESCAPE