Chef Simone Watts and Hayley Morris have been readying regional farm-to-table restaurant Barragunda Dining for four years.

“Hayley and I are just sort of pinching ourselves, floating around the whole time, going, ‘Is this even real?’ And I feel like it every time I walk into the space,” Watts, a former head chef at Coda, tells Broadsheet.

Watts lists Dan Barber’s New York State restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns as a key inspiration, as well as regional Victorian restaurants such as the Hot-Listed Tedesca Osteria and Brae, Wickens at Royal Mail Hotel, and O.My.

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“On a regional level, farm-to-table is becoming more the norm, which is really exciting. It’s not token-gesture kitchen gardens anymore,” she says. What Watts relies on at Barragunda is anything but token. The 40-person restaurant, with its glasshouse dining room, sits on a regenerative farm and market garden on the 1000-acre Barragunda Estate, on the southernmost tip of the Mornington Peninsula.

The menu will evolve constantly. “The main thing about being able to work in a farm to table restaurant is the ability to flip and rotate and adapt,” she says. “I had eggplant on the opening menu and they’re not quite ready, so we flipped it, and we’ve put a new season allium dish on instead with all of the beautiful onions that are coming through.”

A highlight of the opening menu is the dried heirloom tomato with smoked stracciatella and tomato leaf oil. The tomatoes are skinned, lightly cured salt overnight then dried for six to eight hours to dry out and concentrate the flavour. Juice that drips out of the tomato during the process is reduced and used to glaze the dried tomato. “It gets this sexy, unctuous dressing of itself,” says Watts. It’s served on smoked house-made crème fraîche with has shredded house-made mozzarella folded through it, and is finished with tomato leaf oil.

Another standout is a dish that uses Harry’s mussels, served with fennel à la Grecque. Fermented baby fennel is cooked down with white wine, coriander, black pepper and fennel seeds. The simply cooked mussels and fennel are served with what Watts describes as “super-crunchy and umami” sunflower cream made using the whole sunflower, including marrow from the stalk, the seeds and a miso made from last year’s seeds and marrow.

But Watts is most excited for people to try an ode to her late mentor, the pioneering chef Greg Malouf, made with Barragunda’s pastry chef Laura Skvor, who also overseas the restaurant’s bread. The dessert features cardamon-infused orange blossom honey from the farm, apricot crème fraîche ice-cream and a peach compote finished in a peach pit vinegar dressing that’s bruleed with semolina.

“Cardamom and orange blossom sing Greg’s name to me. Greg would always come alive with anything orange blossom,” Watts says.

The restaurant is owned by the Morris Family Foundation, with all profits from the $145 set menu going back into the foundation’s work to improve food systems work. And Morris, who has been involved with the restaurant since its inception, says the opening is a career highlight. For Watts, the opening represents a bond with the local landscape and people.

“It’s about connection to place and reconnecting the local community to their food,” she says. “Showing them how it’s grown, but also getting them to celebrate how beautiful the Mornington Peninsula is and just how fortunate we are to live here.”

Barragunda Dining
113 Cape Schanck Road, Cape Schanck
8644 4050

Hours:
Fri to Mon midday–5.30pm

barragunda.com.au