Where to stay

Islington A Regency manor turned 11-room boutique hotel, the Islington is full of character; antique aficionados wander through its eclectic rooms with gaping mouths. Half the rooms are in the original house and the rest in a well-executed extension; they come with lots of complimentary items too such as iPads, cookies and barista coffee. Doubles from £221. 321 Davey Street, Hobart, 00 61 3 6220 2123, www.islingtonhotel.com

Mona Pavilions If eating, drinking, and wandering around the exhibits at Mona isn’t enough, you can sleep here too. Like everything at the Museum of Old and New Art, quirkiness pervades at these eight high-tech abodes on the River Derwent. Not only were they designed by notable Australian architects and feature original artworks, but they offer panoramic views, and access to a pool, sauna and gym. Doubles from £336. 655 Main Road, Berriedale, Hobart, 00 61 3 6277 9900, www.mona.net.au

Saffire Freycinet Total luxury and seclusion in an outstanding setting overlooking Freycinet National Park. With just 20 suites, all boasting views across Oyster Bay to the Freycinet mountains, it can be very difficult to leave. Some come kitted out with extras such as plunge pools too. The hotel operates on an all-inclusive basis meaning that three excellent meals per day and most drinks are included, and rooms also come with vouchers for use in the decked-out spa. A host of complimentary experiences is on offer, including a visit to Freycinet Marine Farm where you’ll be able to sip bubbly and taste bivalves straight from the water. Doubles all-inclusive from £1,006. 2352 Coles Bay Road, Coles Bay, 00 61 3 6256 7888, www.saffire-freycinet.com.au

Travel Information

The island of Tasmania is a state of Australia and is situated to the southeast of the mainland. Currency is the Australian dollar, and the time is ten hours ahead of GMT. November weather is relatively mild, with average lows of 8°C and average highs of 18°C. Journey time from London is about 27.5 hours.

GETTING THERE

Qantas (www.qantas.com.au) flies daily from London Heathrow to Hobart, with a stop in Sydney.
Emirates (www.emirates.com) flies from London Heathrow to Hobart via Dubai and Melbourne.

RESOURCES

Tourism Australia (www.australia.com). The national tourist board provides information on events, history and culture, and is an invaluable resource for planning your break.
Tourism Tasmania (www.discovertasmania.com.au) is the local tourist board and can help with designing your itinerary or booking tours, as well as providing essential travel information.

FURTHER READING

The Agrarian Kitchen by Rodney Dunn (Lantern, £34). The first cookbook from chef and writer turned food hero Rodney Dunn celebrates the field-to-fork ethos of his Tasmanian cookery school. The book allows the reader to follow his farm through the seasons, and was beautifully photographed by chef Luke Burgess of Garagistes restaurant, which puts some of Rodney’s surplus produce to good use in its dishes (see Rodney’s winter-warming recipes on page 38).
The Gourmet Farmer Deli Book by Matthew Evans, Nick Haddow and Ross O’Meara (Murdoch Books, £28). A kitchen must-have, this book celebrates artisan methods used in making delicatessen favourites such a smoked meats and pickled fish and vegetables; then shows how to use them in simple, rustic, yet inspiring, dishes.

CARBON COUNTING

Conscious about your carbon footprint when flying to Tasmania? Then visit ClimateCare (www.climatecare.org), where you can make a donation to support environmental projects all over the world. Return flights from London produce 5.79 tonnes CO2; cost to offset is £43.44.

Where to eat

Bruny Island Premium Wines Australia’s most southerly vineyard is a worthy lunchtime stop if you’re visiting Bruny, as its dishes showcase much of the island’s produce. Devour Bruny salmon teriyaki kebabs, pan- fried Bruny wallaby and possum sausage with Bruny olives, or Bruny beef overlooking the vineyards. £25. Wayaree Estate, 4391 Main Road, Lunawanna, Bruny Island, 00 61 3 6293 1088, www.brunyislandwine.com

Ethos Eat Drink The ultimate Tasmanian dining experience – chef Iain Todd only serves produce from local suppliers he knows well, and the tasting menu (the only option) changes daily to reflect what he has received. We tried smoky oxtail with pickled eggplant, pickled brown onions, and Bismark potatoes. Located in a historic former pharmacy, there is a Brooklyn-style exposed-brick vibe; after dinner, sneak upstairs to the slick new cocktail bar, which features house-made bitters with Tasmanian ingredients such as sweet woodruff. £42 for six courses.
100 Elizabeth Street, Hobart, 00 61 3 6231 1165, www.ethoseatdrink.com

Freycinet Marine Farm Tasting Room Unpretentious, no-frills outdoor café in Freycinet serving up freshly shucked oysters, lobster, scallops and mussels. Open up a bottle of Tassie sparkling wine and devour them by the plateload. £8 per dozen oysters. 1784 Coles Bay Road, Coles Bay, 00 61 3 6257 0140, www.freycinetmarinefarm.com

Frogmore Creek Overlooking vineyards, undulating purple hills and a serene lake, the setting here would be enough to justify lunch even if the food wasn’t great. But it is: Dutch chef Ruben Koopman creates artful, refined plates from the likes of the vineyard manager’s own lamb or the greenskeeper’s suckling pig. Feast on roasted lamb loin with slow-braised lamb shoulder, sweet potato purée, braised cabbage and bacon with rosemary and garlic jus and baby vegetables – all washed down with Frogmore’s fine wines, including their fruity Evermore pinot noir. Lunch only, Thursday to Monday. Four courses, £45. 699 Richmond Road, Cambridge, 00 61 3 6274 5844, www.frogmorecreek.com.au

Garagistes Chef Luke Burgess’s Hobart restaurant is a must. There is only one option, a five-course tasting menu, which changes daily and can include sake pairings or (mostly) organic and biodynamic wines from around the globe. Before dinner pop around the corner to Sidecar, the tiny sister wine bar on Bathurst Street, a destination in its own right, for a drink and nibbles. Five courses, £50.103 Murray Street, Hobart, 00 61 3 6231 0558, www.garagistes.com.au

Get Shucked This oyster caff is a must-do while on Bruny Island. ‘Naked’ oysters (£8 a dozen) are nothing short of superb, while there is also a range of tasty oyster nibbles, from pâté to panko-crusted bivalves (£9.50 for six) on offer. 1735 Bruny Island Main Road, Great Bay, Bruny Island, 00 61 4 28 606 250, www.getshucked.com.au

Pigeon Hole A fabulous breakfast spot owned by farmer Richard Weston, who supplies produce to most of the top restaurants in Tasmania, and bakes some of Hobart’s finest loaves. Breakfast, £12. 93 Goulburn Street, Hobart, 00 61 3 6236 9306, www.pigeonholecafe.com.au

The Source (see Where to Stay) Mona’s signature restaurant is approached with the same vigour as the rest of the project. It is perched at the top of the museum with panoramic views, and serves innovative cooking – think Tasmanian venison with red cabbage kimchi, chocolate and basil glaze and baby beetroot. Ask staff to pair your meal with their very own Moorilla wines (chardonnay Muse is a winner). £42. 655
Main Road, Berriedale, Hobart, 00 61 3 6277 9900, www.mona.net.au

Two Metre Tall Farm Bar Trained winemaker Ashley Huntington makes unusual ales and ciders which are served from an outdoor bar. Buy one of their beer-fed Angus-wagyu steaks and grill on the communal barbecue while draining a few brews. Fridays and Sundays only. Beer, £3. 2862 Lyell Highway, Hayes, 00 61 3 6261 1930, www.2mt.com.au

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

Declan plunges his hand into the cool waters, and pulls out the largest oyster I have ever seen. Intrigued as much as just plain greedy, I hurriedly step forwards across the bed of bivalves, which sends waves lapping around our waders and ripples radiating gently across Oyster Bay. It takes only moments for his seasoned hands to coax it open – one, two, three slips of the knife and it’s done; a top shell removed to reveal a gleaming interior of pearly white encasing a plump, saline pillow. I cup the oyster in my hands and raise it to my lips. ‘Just a moment,’ Declan urges, pulling a bottle from his bag. Setting it down with ceremony on a stilted table above the water, he pops the cork and pours a splash of sparkling wine – grapes grown less than an hour up the road – into the oyster. There’s an instant briny sweetness, a sparkle of fizz, a cucumbery, nutty flavour. Declan chuckles, then says, ‘Want another one?’

This is Tasmania, where the water is so clean, they eat oysters straight from the seabed. It’s where the rainwater is so pure, it’s bottled and sold. This is where trees are heavy with apples and avocados, where walnuts and wasabi thrive and pantries overflow with island-grown quinoa and barley. Thanks to an almost incomparable cross section of geography, geology and climate, this island is a modern-day Garden of Eden, tucked at the edge of the world. And being on the fringe (no really, next stop south is Antarctica) for a long time it was Australia’s secret.

Once famous for its convicts and devils, Tasmania has long drawn visitors on the promise of azure-fringed white sand beaches, craggy mountains carpeted in wildlife and thick, ancient forests, replete with monstrously large hardwoods. Those tourists still come, but now they’re not alone. The foodies have landed. As mainland Australia becomes hotter and drier, the promise of bounty from this provincial backwater has propelled it to the top of culinary bucket lists. As more than one local puts it, ‘They used to joke that down here we had two heads. But now everyone wants to be Tasmanian.’

Once we have had our fill of oysters (it does take a while), Declan drives us along a road of crushed shells back towards Saffire Freycinet. Stretching out like an enormous stingray floating towards the purple silhouette of The Hazards mountains, this is one of Australia’s most luxurious resorts, built with a new kind of visitor in mind. It’s integrated into the coastal landscape of Coles Bay as though it has risen from the red-tinged soils. Tonight it’s illuminated by a kaleidoscopic sunset throwing golden tones through the floor-to-ceiling windows, as chef Simon Pockran brings out a platter of gleaming abalone.

Tasmania provides 25 per cent of the world’s wild supply of these sea creatures, and when shipped to China they are sold for thousands of pounds a kilo. But in Tasmania all the locals have to do is what they always have done – take a dip in a carefully chosen bay, and pluck their dinner straight from the seabed. The typical Tassie way is thinly sliced and grilled, and fanned over toasted bread; but whisked back into the kitchen, Simon’s is transformed into a delicate chawanmushi. Slivers of just-cooked flesh, tasting gently of the sea, rest on a silky dashi custard flecked with local calamari, scallops and purslane, and the crunch of almond. This is cooking that wouldn’t be out of place in London or New York.

The demand for places like Saffire, the locals say, is up ever since Mona opened. The Museum of Old and New Art, founded by eccentric Tasmanian multi-millionaire David Walsh, sits like a Bond villain’s lair just outside Hobart’s compact centre. The museum’s theme, ‘sex and death’, shocked at first. Now the locals say how lucky they are to have it. There is no quantifying the exhibits, which range from a row of stones that survived the blast at Hiroshima to a machine that replicates a working digesting stomach. When Walsh got married recently at the gallery he commissioned a penis-shaped banquet table for the occasion. But it’s not all out to shock – thanks to Walsh, the vineyards that have long existed on the site are producing smooth chardonnays, a brewery is turning out one of island’s most popular beers, Moo Brew, and Mona boasts its own top- end accommodation and regular food festivals. Not to mention an acclaimed on-site restaurant, The Source, because when you have a world-class museum raking in jet-setting visitors, you really do need somewhere decent for them to eat too.

This fact has not been lost on the chefs in town. At Garagistes, chef Luke Burgess has become something of a poster boy for Tasmanian cooking. Looking for a change, he migrated down from Sydney to open his Hobart restaurant in 2010 and now it’s consistently named as one of the country’s finest.

‘I just cook food I like to eat,’ he says, leaning against the slick wooden bar, a focal point in a dining room of clean Scandinavian-style lines. ‘And it’s important for me to use Tasmanian produce. Though we’ve had to change from à la carte to a set menu, because we were going through so much food my suppliers couldn’t keep up!’ Being adaptable is part of the game here, and so it might not be until colourful heirloom tomatoes land on Luke’s doorstep that he decides to enhance them with a vinegary hit of pickled kombu and a smoky iced salep dondurma (Turkish ice cream) made with angasi oyster. With flavours such as these, it is easy to see why people come.

Dedicated as he is to the sourcing of local produce, it’s hard to outdo Iain Todd at Hobart restaurant Ethos Eat Drink. Occupying an old chemist’s that had been bricked up and forgotten about for a century, before construction workers revealed it, there’s a worn-in feel not always found in this part of the world. However, the food is modern, and exclusively local: an immaculate bay trumpeter with cured radish and crème fraîche; Bruny Island pork with apple, lettuce and quince; and oxtail on a smoky grill with pickled brown onions and Bismark potatoes all hail from Tasmania.

‘There has been a big time change in the last two years,’ says Iain. ‘Mona is bringing people that expect more. I wanted to do something totally different: simple and refined and cooking with what is good to eat now. Until recently, Hobart wasn’t ready for it – I needed to get people to trust me.’ Trust is big for Iain who buys only from producers he knows personally and, because quantities are small, the menu changes daily. About 70 different suppliers bring in a bit of this or that. Often they are just friends with something good from their own garden, who want to see it treated with respect and finesse.

One of those 70 is Richard Weston, a Tasmanian horticulturalist turned farmer and café owner with an infectious smile. We settle down together for breakfast at his place, Pigeon Hole, whose dusty jade green walls are complemented by wood panelling. There are ribbons of grilled courgette with lemony local Tongola cheese, and spelt porridge topped with slices of the juiciest ever greengages. Over this spread, Richard gives me his take on the gourmet boom. ‘At first we used to grow the standard stuff, but now chefs like Luke and Iain are asking me what I can do next. I hadn’t appreciated it until I travelled, but in Tasmania we have the best soils in the world and an amazing climate. We’re experimenting with everything.’ Chefs text him a shopping list every week, knowing that whatever is picked makes it from the ground to their kitchens in a little over an hour. From tomatoes and cabbages Richard’s offering has swollen to the likes of white asparagus, finger eggplants, tomatillo, nashi pear, burdock, Padrón peppers, Russian kale and white peaches. The next challenge will be a rare cardamom, which sells at several hundred Australian dollars per kilo.

Experimentation is becoming a familiar theme. Tasmanian wines, from champagne doppelgängers to elegant pinots, have been on the map for a few years now, especially as big mainland wineries snap up vineyards producing in-vogue cool-climate styles. But the latest success story is whisky. After just 20 years at it, the industry celebrated a coup in March when one of the state’s seven distilleries, Sullivans Cove, was crowned world’s best, beating the Scottish and Japanese. The water helps, but so too do the flourishing fields of barley and the peat bogs. We head for a tasting at the island’s newest distillery, Redlands, located amid a farm and gardens on a beautiful, historic red- bricked estate in the lush Derwent Valley, northwest of Hobart.

Each of the island’s offerings is bright yet delicate, rich with aromas of golden apples. Redlands’ own isn’t ready yet, it needs another year, but that doesn’t stop us opening a barrel for a preview. Bright top notes sing through, and it’s clearly destined to be something special when it is ready.

Where there’s barley, there’s bound to be beer. Rumbling across the undulating Derwent countryside, past rolling fields of skyward-reaching hops and wind-rustled barley, the shift in landscape from the Freycinet mountains or the flatness of Hobart is marked. As we turn into the drive of Two Metre Tall brewery, Jane Huntington strolls down to meet us, before cracking open a few bottles at the outdoor bar. After studying winemaking in France, Jane and husband Ashley moved to the island with a dream to plant a vineyard. They bought their plot, then saw the local hops and changed their minds.

‘At first we had to explain to everyone what a craft brewery was,’ she tells us. ‘Now there are about ten others doing what we’re doing.’ Few are doing it quite like them, though. Ashley, who brews the beers, likes to have fun. There’s wine yeast in this beer; morello cherries grown across the road in that one. Another is a soured ale designed for ageing; then there are the ciders. Jane steps behind the bar and reappears with a marbled steak, 30 days aged since it was taken from one of their beer-fed Angus-wagyu cows.

As the afternoon sun radiates down, illuminating the grassy hills around us, we grill the steak on the barbecue until the outside is caramelised and the inside is like ruby butter. Along with a salad of Pink Eye potatoes and a loaf of fresh sourdough, it’s a meal we’d be happy to last forever. And so, anxious not to rush things, we tip a bit more cider into our glasses.

The next day we’re bowling along ‘up the hill’ west of Hobart to The Agrarian Kitchen. The home and cookery school of Rodney Dunn – who was previously a food editor and chef before relocating with his family from Sydney seven years ago – has become somewhere of a pilgrimage for mainland Australians. As he takes us through his organic, near-self- sufficient farm, he excitedly points out grapes and melons, asparagus and Padrón peppers, amaranth and borlotti beans, lovage and corn for meal. We see the pigs he rears for smoked meats; the goats he milks to make labne; the bees for honey. And we taste his homemade triple-fermented beer. He has learned as he goes. ‘In the last year we’ve planted 200 different varieties of plant, just to see what works,’ Rodney says. ‘And 95 per cent of what we use in the classes comes from our garden.’

We chat about farming tips he’s picked up from Richard Weston, a friend, and how Luke Burgess from Garagistes introduced him to his wife. He’s another link in this new gourmet network; a pioneering food brigade anxious to stretch the culinary limits of this island as far as it can go. Because here at the end of the world, for the moment anyway, there are no boundaries. So when I ask Rodney what the next project is, a smile just broadens across his face.