Advertisement16.5/20Critics’ Pick

Three Blue Ducks Burradoo

Contemporary$$$$

If you’ve been to the Three Blue Ducks at Byron Bay, you’ll know it as a place of agricultural education, roaming farm animals, croissants and casual lunches with a view to working fields. If that Northern Rivers site is a Disneyland of pickles and fresh produce, the Three Blue Ducks’ Burradoo Park Farm home is its even more ambitious Disney World cousin in the south.

Since opening at Easter, five minutes’ drive from Bowral, it has been a bigger Southern Highlands tourism drawcard than Don Bradman’s bat and the Big Potato combined. Guests visiting at peak times on weekends will need to book a free ticket to access the cafe, retail shop, bakery, gelateria, glasshouses, walking tours, educational kitchen garden, playground, workshops and exhibition on the majesty of bees. The money and initiative behind the project comes from billionaire Annie Cannon-Brookes.

Advertisement

I’m sure Burradoo Park is a delightful way to learn about dirt and cows, but for the purposes of this column, I want to talk about the Three Blue Ducks restaurant inside a restored 1823 heritage farmhouse. Seven courses cost $210, and it was one of the most cohesive tasting menus I’ve had this year.

An opening “warm welcome” of clarified chicken broth – made with the bones of big healthy chooks who spent a good life running (relatively) free – sets the tone for a highly comforting three hours in the hands of invested staff pouring low-intervention wine for day-trippers and Henschke for locals. Rock oysters come with a sorbet of sorrel stems dusted with native pepper (the combination works!); trout roe is marinated in beetroot until it’s a vibrant shade of boysenberry, and spooned into a crisp thimble-sized shell of blitzed radicchio; the crunchier part of bitter-green puntarelle is lightly pickled in sake vinegar and stuffed with a blend of chilli mayonnaise and raw red-spot prawns.

Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox.

Sign up

This is very cheffy stuff, and much different than the Three Blue Ducks healthy salads and family-friendly grilling at Byron Bay and Rosebery. Ducks co-founder Darren Robertson, who worked for eight years at Tetsuya’s, rising to head chef, must dig getting back to his roots. While Robertson tends to other Ducks ventures, former Quay head chef Troy Crisante runs the kitchen with Rhys Connell, who held senior roles at three-hatted Sepia. Fine-dining Avengers, assemble.

A cover crop salad inspired by Burradoo Park’s regenerative farming practices, where crops are planted to improve the soil, is an early signature. An artisan ceramic bowl holds the many textures of sprouted grains, legumes, barley and field peas, and it’s supremely tasty stuff, largely thanks to a blanket of fermented turnip-boosted beurre blanc and garlic chive oil. Like most dishes here, it will evolve over the weeks and seasons.

Advertisement

On my visit in August, an assiette of Australian White-breed lamb (raised with their mothers 200 metres from the restaurant) featured braised shoulder, cutlet cooked on the bone, butter-poached haunch and sweetbreads poached in a coffee-flavoured nage for extra richness. Garlic-tinged sheep’s yoghurt and a shiso sort-of-salsa were foils to the lamb’s grassy fat, while a sticky lamb-bone sauce brought everything together. Delicious. Inspired. Filling. A total celebration of the sheep.

If seven courses plus snacks isn’t enough, add-ons include a $40 custard with black truffle and Misty Valley mushrooms, and Burradoo Park dry-aged beef that will set you back $85 for about 220 grams (maybe more, I didn’t bring my scales). If you want to compare cows owned by billionaires, and I do, the flavour is longer and more complex than any of that 2GR wagyu peddled in several CBD grills (the “GR” stands for Gina Rinehart, you know).

I suppose you could be cynical about an agritourism enterprise owned by Cannon-Brookes, who placed 21st on the Financial Review Rich List in May, but I’m all for it – especially in contrast to the interests of some others on that list. When the super rich also care about farming and soil and future generations, that feels like a win for everybody (except, perhaps, for the local Burradoo residents, now dealing with a lot more BYD hatchbacks on their streets).

The low-down

Atmosphere: Relaxed yet refined farmhouse dining

Go-to dishes: Cover crop salad; radicchio and roe; Australian White lamb with sheep’s yoghurt and shiso; potatoes with creme fraiche, caramel and liquorice

Drinks: Wine list championing growers farming with care, featuring emerging and established Australian producers plus a few internationals; easy-going cocktails utilising garden produce, such as a “pickled puntarelle martini” 

Cost: Five courses, $175 (lunch only); seven courses, $210

Advertisement

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

Continue this edition

The September 12 editionUp next

Test your general knowledge with the Good Weekend quiz

Trivia buffs: can you get a perfect score in the interactive superquiz?

Previously

  • Review

‘Ostentatiously fun’: Would you tackle one of these supersized American-style pizzas?

Pizza Elettrica’s 15-inch pies are the pizza for right now, when people are “maxxing” everything from protein to joy. But size aside, there’s a balance to their toppings.

See all stories

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

License this article

More:

Callan Boys is Good Food’s national eating out and restaurant editor.Connect via X or email.AdvertisementAdvertisement