Van Bone

Van Bone takes a lot of cues from the nature around it: from its earthen design to the hyperlocal food that ends up on your plate. Travelling down Marion Bay Road, 45 minutes’ drive from Hobart, you’ll notice its solid yet spare structure. Its rammed earth walls both rise from and blend into the green-brown landscape surrounding it.

Just down the hill, a colourful on-site kitchen garden grows most of the produce, working with the capricious seasons to craft a regularly rotating, always creative menu. Depending on the time of year, expect lush patches of tomatoes, pumpkins, painted corn or cauliflower.

With some crop seasons lasting only two weeks, there’s no signature dish here. But the house-made brioche pastry, reinvented each time, is a standout. In the warmer months, it could be topped with garden tomatoes – smoked using the neighbour’s vine trimmings – and finished with Tongola’s Big B cheese, which is made with milk from goats that live around the corner.

Fire plays a big role here, too. Co-owner and chef Timothy Hardy (ex-Vasse Felix, Lake House Daylesford, Brae, now-closed Garagistes) prepares most of the dishes in the woodfired oven or over a charcoal pit. That might be a plate of confit Peking duck with braised leek, beef short rib alongside smoked eel, or charcoal-grilled ocean perch with mustard greens from the garden.

Every ingredient that plays a role is local, from the finishing salt to the locally pressed oil, to the apple cider vinegar made here in the Apple Isle, along with the Tasmanian drinks list, which features locally made wines, beer, cider, cocktails and non-alc cocktails.

There are on-site bees, too, which make batches of honey with notes of clover and dandelion. That inspires the dessert of the day, which might be house-churned milk sorbet, near-burnt honeycomb and caramelised milk powder.

It’s all part of co-owners Hardy and his partner Laura Stucken’s mission to run a low-impact restaurant in an inspiring and productive landscape. Drawing on Stucken's background in architecture and interior design (she designed Bread in Common in Fremantle), the 20-seat space is dramatic in its minimalism. It features solid Tasmanian oak walls, concrete floors and large windows that showcase the rolling pastures and patch of produce outside. After your meal, you can head out there for a stroll through the garden.