Where to stay

Prices quoted are for a double room based on two people sharing with breakfast (unless otherwise stated).

Cape Lodge Twice voted Australia’s best boutique hotel, set amid bush and billabongs, with an award-winning restaurant and an excellent in-house masseuse. Rooms from £310. 3341 Caves Road, Yallingup, 00 618 9755 6311, capelodge.com.au

Must Wine Bar Suites The obvious place to stay when dining at Must Bistro; three large suites are hidden above the restaurant on the main street of Margaret River. Rooms from £118. 107 Bussell Highway, Margaret River, 00 618 9758 8877, must.com.au

Silkwood Winery Ultra-luxurious chalets perched on the water’s edge in the grounds of a Pemberton winery, where food is available during the day. Rooms cost from £212. 9649 Channybearup Road, Pemberton, 00 618 9776 1584, silkwoodwines.com.au

The Rocks, Albany An old governor’s residence, full of Victoriana, with lovely harbour views, and its breakfasts feature owner Noelene Evans’s home-made chilli jam. Doubles from £228. 182-188 Grey Street West, Albany, 00 618 9842 5969, therocksalbany.com.au

Travel Information

The official currency is the Australian dollar (AU$). Western Australia is seven hours ahead of GMT. The southwest has mild winters and hot summers. The thermometer can hit 32°C between December and February but it is pleasant even in winter months (June to August) wit an average temperature of 14°C.

GETTING THERE
Cathay Pacific (cathaypacific.co.uk) flies four times a day from Heathrow to Hong Kong, connecting to a daily service to Perth.
Skywest (skywest.com.au) has flights from Perth to either Busselton Airport, for the Margaret River region, or to Albany.
Margaret River is an easy three-hour drive south of Perth.

RESOURCES
Tourism Western Australia (westernaustralia.com) is the state tourist board and provides details on attractions across Western Australia as wellas information on accommodation, restaurants and tours. Or download the free app, Explore WA, to your smartphone.
Australia’s South West (australiassouthwest.com) provides similar services for visitors to the region.

FURTHER READING
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (Picador, £8.99). A born and bred West Aussie, Tim Winton is one of the country’s best-loved authors. His books are largely inspired by memories of his upbringing in coastal WA. This, his most famous novel, tells the story of 20 years in the lives of the Lambs and the Pickles, two very different families who share a house in a Perth suburb.

Where to eat

Lime 303 Albany’s best restaurant offers inventive cuisine – don’t miss the starter plate featuring terrine of crocodile, whose legs are also served confit. Three courses with wine will come to about £60. Dog Rock Motel, 303 Middleton Rd, Albany, 00 618 9845 7200, dogrockmotel.com.au

Pepper & Salt Subtly spiced local ingredients are used for lunch (Thursday to Sunday) and dinner (Fridays only) in this lovely restaurant on Rockliffe Winery; buy wine from £18 a bottle after tasting, then expect to spend £50 on your meal. 18 Hamilton Road, Denmark, 00 618 9848 3053, matildasestate.com

Foragers Cooking school with top credentials serves seasonal four-course set dinners every Saturday for £48 per person including corkage (no wine is sold on the premises). Advance booking esssential. 1 Roberts Road, Pemberton, 00 618 9776 1580, foragers.com.au

Must Wine Bar & Bistro (see also ‘Where to Stay’) The best choice for dinner in town, given that winery kitchens serve lunch only. From £55 for three courses, with wine available by the glass from £6. 107 Bussell Highway,
Margaret River, 00 618 9758 8877, must.com.au

Cullen Winery Organic, biodynamic kitchen in a rustic setting that serves lunch only. Set lunch, £32, or order à la carte from about £21 for a main course. Wine starts from £16 a bottle. Caves Road, Wilyabrup, 00 618 9755 5277, cullenwines.com.au

Cellar Door Aaron Carr’s highly inventive kitchen at the Vasse Felix winery serves lunch only, seven days a week. Three courses are about £77, with wine starting at £16 a bottle (or from £4 a glass). Caves Road, Cowaramup, 00 618 9756 5000, vassefelix.com.au

Blue Ginger Fine Foods The place for a slap-up breakfast or casual lunch, this eclectic international deli and café is in the heart of Margaret River. From £10 for a main course and drink. 31 Station Road, Margaret River, 00 618 9758 7619, bluegingerfinefoods.com

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

It’s a little paradise on the edge of the world – slip off the wild coast where the Indian and Southern oceans collide, and you’re headed for nowhere but Antarctica. So why are so many people moving to Australia’s far-flung southwest?

‘I’d say 99.99 per cent of the people you’ll meet here have a smile on their face – and that’s because they really want to be here,’ reckons Tony Howell. His food wins awards but is not the main reason he is permanently blissed out himself. ‘It’s about the surfing, diving and biking as well as having fun in my kitchen,’ is how the former city boy puts it, summing up just a few of the attributes that continue to draw new residents from Australia’s crowded cities.

Howell’s talents have helped put Margaret River’s Cape Lodge bush boutique hotel on the world luxury lifestyle map. His friend Aaron Carr’s culinary creations make a visit to the region’s Vasse Felix winery a show-stopping event. Both men are examples of a new breed of surfing chefs who came to ride the waves years ago and never left. You can understand why they stayed when you stand on the white dunes studded with succulents above Prevelly Beach and marvel at some of the biggest breakers you have ever seen.

But Australia’s southwest is as much about forests, dams, vines and one of the nation’s most diverse and abundant wildflower habitats as the coast that first attracted the hippies and surfers who colonised the area half a century ago. A relaxed way of life in a location with lush, fertile soil warmed by plenty of sunshine and shaded by majestic trees, wetlands and peaceful rivers has led a new generation of winemakers and food producers to follow in the surfers’ wake. Collectively, they have made the southwest perhaps the best-fed and watered corner of the ‘Lucky Country’.

‘I can hardly believe how many of us here gave up stressed jobs in the world’s big cities to pursue our passion for food,’ says Ian Haines, who used to manage the smooth running of the BBC TV centre in London until he chucked it in to open a restaurant in the old whaling town of Albany nearly 30 years ago.

‘You couldn’t even buy an avocado here back then,’ Haines recalls. ‘There was a general malaise because the whaling industry was closing down and the town needed to find a new role for itself.’

What Albany did have going for it was an abundance of food producers who saved the day. ‘Then, their produce was all shipped to Perth; now it is embraced by locals who want to know where their food is coming from,’ continues Haines. T he catalyst for change was the opening of a farmer’s market. ‘It showed locals that good food came with a level of taste, flavour and texture, which had been lost in what they were being sold, and that choice had been eroded.’

The market, which celebrated its tenth birthday last April, has transformed Albany, adds Haines: ‘We have a thriving café culture, an organic shop, even our own coffee roaster.’

Clearly, Haines was not the only incomer who wanted to slow down, eat well and enjoy a better life. In his role as market coordinator, he introduces a variety of moonlighting professionals who produce delights that have made the market one of the best in Australia.

Ruth Heady is a psychologist who stays up into the wee small hours making yoghurt, fromage frais, feta and other delicacies. These are named after whichever of her Jersey cows, Gemma, Hannah and Pippa, produced the milk to make them. ‘I have plans for my goats, too,’ says Head, the owner of Fairy & Co, the business named after her first dairy goat. She also keeps sheep, pigs and ducks and hopes eventually to become a full-time farmer.

Carrielea Snow holds down a day job as a dental assistant, but on Saturday mornings she’s the star of the market. Crowds queue for her yabbie pies, pastries packed with the plump pink crustaceans her husband catches in the nearby dam. Shoppers munch them as they buy organic lamb, exotic greens and rare honeys from the soaring karri, jarrah and marri trees that are a distinguishing feature of this majestic landscape. Jarrah honey, in particular, is prized for having the antibacterial and nutritional qualities associated with manuka – no wonder it flies off the stall.

It would be easy to miss laidback Albany, with its time-warp shop façades, and the cool climate wineries of nearby Denmark when heading for better-known Margaret River. To do so, though, would be a crying shame. The Great Southern, the region’s official name, may be more remote and less ritzy than the west coast, but it is full of engaging characters who make a visit particularly rewarding.

Kester Solomon funded his dream of a fin de siècle Parisian bar with the fruits of his former career as a professional poker player. The native Australian turned his back on the bright lights of Las Vegas to open Liberté at the London, which brings an exotic touch of louche art nouveau, along with espresso martinis, to Albany.

Gareth James used to drive forklift trucks until a passion for fishing turned into a new career as an oysterman. He is now a director of Ocean Foods International, the leading producer of Albany rock oysters, so prized for the fresh, clear taste they are lent by Albany Bay’s pristine waters that chefs call for them from as far afield as China and Singapore. James is no suit, despite his job title – every day sees him in waders, driving his boat out along the line to ensure his 20,000 beautiful bivalves are sleeping nicely in their briny beds.

Oysters are not the Australian southwest’s only export; the region is the world’s second largest exporter of black truffles after Perigord itself. Just as the soil and climatic conditions of Margaret River were found to mirror those of Bordeaux, the oaks of the Southern Forest provide excellent cover for the prized and fragrant fungi. Truffles can be tasted in a variety of dishes at the Wine & Truffle Co in Manjimup, where they use their truffle oil, truffle salt and truffle honey judiciously in the kitchen at those times when the tubers themselves, pulled from the soil by their team of rescue dogs, are out of season.

The truffle farm is near Pemberton, the perfect stopover between Albany and Margaret River, and a must-do in its own right. Firstly, its dams are awash with marron, the inky-black giant crayfish prized throughout the region. When marron are available, the Pemberton Millhouse Café serves them briefly barbecued with garlic butter. Secondly, some of the southern hemisphere’s most luxurious self-catering cabins are to be found in lake-studded bush by the Silkwood winery. Perhaps most importantly, Pemberton is where Sophie Zalokar and her Swiss husband Chris have set up a cooking school and restaurant deep in the forest, offering some of the finest – if in many ways the simplest – food in the southwest.

‘I was drawn to move here because it was important to me to live among producers who are really connected to the land,’ says Sophie, who trained with Maggie Beer at South Australia’s famous Pheasant Farm restaurant, before leaving her native Barossa Valley for the wilder west. ‘I was intrigued to learn that people from 52 different nations had settled in the Southern Forest, so we have strong Italian and Macedonian food traditions here.’

Sophie serves a memorable meal that begins with pumpkinenriched hummus sprinkled with a wonderful hazelnut and almond dukkah. It’s followed by a delicate carpaccio of kohlrabi laced with discs of raw-milk Manchego, which would be a dish of purest white but for tawny shreds of sweet local goldrush pears, a sprinkle of walnuts and a chiffonade of mustard greens that lend bite as well as colour. Then comes a poached fillet of local organic grassfed beef with potato and parsnip dauphinoise, horseradish cream and a pungent salad of flat-leaf parsley and watercress picked just hours earlier. A tough act to follow, but meringues decorated with flash-roasted strawberries, rhubarb and cream infused with fragrant rose geranium have the requisite star quality.

Food this exciting is unexpected in the middle of nowhere, yet we encounter dishes of similar quality at Pepper & Salt on the Rockliffe Winery in Denmark. There, Silas Masih delicately jazzes up marron and other local produce with spicing that draws on his Fijian-Indian heritage and perfectly complements the sensational Rockliffe chardonnay, made in the heady but elegant Meursault style encountered all over the southwest. Gourmet cuisine, however, is totally expected in Margaret River, whose chardonnays, semillons and cabernet sauvignons attract visitors with sophisticated palates from all over the world.

Top wineries are on the front line of fine dining, vying for the most alluring ‘cellar door’, or visitor experience. Both Vasse Felix and Cullen, which pioneered the planting of vines in Margaret River in
the 1960s, have excellent kitchens, each with a very different style.

Aaron Carr arrived from Perth in 1991 to surf on his day off, never went home and has been cooking at Vasse Felix for 16 years. He creates plates of exquisite complexity that pack a piquant flavour punch as well as delighting the eye. He sends out an antipasto of home-cured kangaroo pastrami, steamed yabbies, pearls of local melon and beetroot of many colours, some cooked, some lightly pickled. Then a green and gold deconstructed sushi plate – lightly cured kingfish, smoked eel, flying fish roe, avocado and cucumber, playfully garnished with rice cooked with squid ink and dried to a salty black cracker. A dessert platter of dark chocolate mousse, chocolate jelly, coconut roulade and violet ice cream strewn with crystallised violets delivers a finishing wow factor.

Things are simpler over at Cullen, a biodynamic winery north of Margaret River where restaurant chef Matt Egan is led simply by what’s looking good in his organic garden. While we feast on whiting infused with lemongrass and an Asian rice cake with seared local abalone, Vanya Cullen, the winery’s managing director and a vegetarian, tucks happily into a goat’s cheese soufflé with peas, young beans and herbs planted and plucked according to the phases of the moon, a notion in which she delights.

‘We harvest the grapes for the Diana Madeline – named in memory of my mother – on the first day of a full moon,’ explains Vanya, the sixth child of the doctor and physiotherapist who planted the winery’s first vines in 1966. ‘I remember last year’s supermoons rising behind us as we picked as a sort of blessing.’ Vanya’s mission statement since taking over the vineyards in 1999, she says, has been to concentrate on ‘strengthening the sense of the land in the glass’, and is proud that what was once the area’s largest winery is now one of its smallest.

At Cape Lodge, Tony Howell finds inspiration from both his organic kitchen garden and the richness of local produce. ‘Not just my own garden,’ Howell says, ‘not just the stuff I get from Mike, an old hippie who grows Padrón peppers and all kinds of other wonderful stuff for me from seeds he gathers from around the world, but even my friends’ orchard, where I can pick 18 different kinds of peach.

‘Then there’s the marron and the abalone, the trout someone breeds locally for me. Whatever comes to the back door that’s good – and there’s so much – is what dictates that night’s menu.’

We are served a divine truffled marron on a bed of celeriac and macadamia nut remoulade, followed by Arkady lamb braised and served with a white anchovy and watercress salad, followed by a lemon and passionfruit curd semi-freddo. Our eyes are delighted too, as we dine overlooking a billabong that is framed by red earth and a few thousand of the wattles, banksias, orchids and other wildflowers that make spring in Western Australia so glorious.

There’s only one place to go to follow such a meal, and that’s down the road to Gabriel Chocolate, where Gabriel Myburgh, one of Margaret River’s newest arrivals, has invested a fortune in the machinery needed to create fine handmade chocolate using rare cocoa beans from around the world. Until recently Gabriel was a big city lawyer – of course he was, given the well-established pattern of stressed urban professionals migrating to the region to pursue their culinary passions. And who is that other Gabriel in the apron dishing out tasting samples? That’s Gabriel senior, who at 75 thought he had retired from medicine until his son got him all fired up about bringing the bean to bar concept to Australia’s foodiest corner.

The two Gabriels should be even more stressed these days than when they were urban professionals, given the crowds flooding through their place demanding fine bars strewn with jewel-like edible decorations. But it’s a kind of stress they welcome and embrace, because like everyone around them they absolutely, positively want to be in Australia’s glorious southwest.

Dont’t miss :

Albany Farmers’ Market This Saturday morning fixture on Collie Street is the single best reason to visit the town. Go early – by 9am some produce starts selling out. albanyfarmersmarket.com.au

Liberté at the London Hotel Albany’s eclectic bar and cocktail lounge, also a good place for a decent morning coffee after shopping at the market. 162 Stirling Terrace, Albany, 00 618 9847 4797

Valley of the Giants A treetop walk high among ancient tingle trees in the Walpole Forest, between Denmark and Pemberton. valleyofthegiants.com.au

Wine and Truffle Co Join the truffle hunt in season at this plantation in Manjimup, near Pemberton, or just enjoy truffle products at lunch; these are also sold with the firm’s own wine at the cellar door. wineandtruffle.com.au

Cambray Sheep Cheese At Nannup, a small town between Pemberton and Margaret River, Jane Wilde makes delicate, award-winning cheese you can taste with home-made scones in her café or take away. cambraysheepcheese.com.au

Olio Bello At Cowaramup Outside Margaret River, award-winning organic olive oil is sold plain or pressed with a variety of ingredients from passionfruit to citrus, basil and parmesan. oliobello.com

Margaret River Providore Passionfruit curd is just one of dozens of homemade gourmet delights from this purveyor of every kind of delicious preserve and relish you can pack into a jar. Try their olive jam. At Wilyabrup, just outside town. providore.com.au

Gabriel Chocolate Don’t leave the Caves Road strip at Yallingup without visiting Australia’s newest chocolatier, concocting excellent bean to bar confections and offering free tastings daily. gabrielchocolate.com.au

Samudra In Dunsborough, north of Margaret River, surfer and yoga fanatic Sheridan Hammond serves as a reminder of the area’s hippie days with his organic vegetarian café, garden, yoga studios and bamboo clothing store. 226 Naturaliste Terrace, Dunsborough, 00 618 9779 9977