Australia & NZFood & Drink

Australia’s trendiest food and wine experiences

Doot Doot Doot, Jackalope Hotel, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria

Regional Australia has a new wave of restaurants rivaling their big city siblings. By tapping into the best produce of their region, these countryside eateries are creating a new kind of Australian regional cuisine.

Taras Ochota, founder of Ochota Barrels, Adelaide Hills, South Australia

Australian wines are heading down a brave, enthralling new path, looking to the past to bring natural, small-batch, organically and biodynamically farmed grapes to the future. Processed in the winery with minimal intervention (no additives), they’ve fast become some of the most joyous young wines on the planet. The formation of The Natural Selection Theory, a group formed by Shobbrook, Lucy Margaux and Jauma Wine, is credited with kick-starting the movement. The trio started producing natural wine in a warehouse in Sydney before relocating to South Australia, which is now the epicentre of Australia’s natural wine revolution.

Ester Restaurant & Bar, Sydney, New South Wales

Australian chefs are returning to our most elemental roots, utilising Australia’s unique ingredients over the most natural heat source on the planet: wood. In the heart of Sydney, chef Lennox Hastie’s Firedoor is arguably the lead champion of the trend, but you’ll find further evidence at several prominent nearby restaurants including Ester, No.1 Bent Street, Stanbuli, Porteno, Fred’s and Three Blue Ducks.

Royal Mail Hotel, Dunkeld, Victoria

There are few things more relaxing than leaving the big smoke and absorbing the natural beauty of Australia. In recent years, this experience has been made even more magnificent with the rise of farm stays that deliver a feast to be reckoned with. Australia’s regional landscape is now dotted with exceptional eat-and-stay locations, some also operating as Agrikitchens, where chefs utilise the land to grow the produce they cook in their kitchen.

La Buvette Drinkery, Adelaide, South Australia

There has been a real coming of age in Australia’s dining sector, where venues with a uniquely Australian vibe have begun to put excellent wine as their first priority, with food menus designed to complement the perfect drop, rather than the other way around. In these venues, tablecloths have been ripped from tabletops, the formalities of finer dining left on the coat rack and patrons encouraged to ‘choose their own adventure’ in surrounds that have all the swagger of a wine bar, but offer food to rival the nation’s finest restaurants, too.

The d’Arenberg Cube, Osborn Road, McLaren Vale, South Australia

A series of high-end conceptual art and design experiences is currently sweeping Australia’s vineyards, the most hotly anticipated of which is the avant-garde d’Arenberg Cube at the d’Arenberg winery in South Australia’s McLaren Vale wine region. This multi-storey feat of architecture will house public and private tasting rooms, virtual fermenters, bars and a restaurant in a structure resembling a half-solved Rubik’s cube. The cube is crowned with 16 hydraulic umbrellas which open in a playful, choreographed sequence of movement.

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