An unwavering commitment to grow-it-yourself plus HR wins – including a dynamic cooking duo in the kitchen – sees this regional benchmark in career-best form.
15.5/20
Contemporary$$
Lunch at Glenarty Road is one of the most nourishing, rewarding and uplifting food experiences you can experience in WA. But you’re going to have to work for it.
Like so many singular dining experiences, you’ll need to secure a reservation and commit the hours and dollars for one of the set menus. Glenarty Road is also in Karridale: a lush South West hamlet that’s roughly halfway between Margaret River and Augusta. Karridale is big on greenery, but low on taxis and rideshares. Someone’s going to need to dig out those driving gloves.
Thankfully, the sights of the Bussell and Brockman highways make for a pleasant journey. The op-shops. The produce stalls. The vineyards and paddocks: a reminder of the importance of agriculture to WA’s identity and economy. Or at least pre-resources boom, anyhow. No one gets excited about seeing drill rigs and XL dump trucks. Locals and tourists alike pull over to photograph pastures filled with livestock and golden canola fields. (But please, snap away from a distance: those seas of gold represent farmers’ livelihoods.)
Glenarty Road also has much to point smartphones at, starting with the fruit trees and rows of plants dotted around the carpark. Pleasing aesthetics aside, these details hint at the property’s history as a working 240-hectare farm established in the 1940s by William McDonald. It wasn’t until 2017 that Glenarty Road the restaurant was born when McDonald’s grandson Ben and his winemaker wife Sasha McDonald rebooted the property’s timber shed into a cosy cellar door and dining room where they served honest farmhouse cooking and estate wines.
The restaurant and its roster of staff have since grown and evolved. The relaxed, assured service under restaurant manager Georgia Badyk is bang-on for country lunching; local winemaker Bec Durham guides cellar door tastings; while Martine Surprenant leads the gardening team that sows, grows and harvests the pristine, often lesser-seen herbs, fruits and veg that co-head chefs Jess Widmer Court and Adam Court cook with.
Individually, each of the Courts has been Glenarty’s head chef. This is the first time, at least officially, that the husband-and-wife duo have run the kitchen together. Based on my latest meal, I wish they had joined forces, Deadpool & Wolverine-style, sooner.
I’m sure that the luscious, sweet-sour oxheart tomatoes and dainty cucamelons on the garden plate – one of the five courses on the Every Acre menu – would have tasted great fresh off the vine. But arranging such dazzling veg atop smoked cow’s milk curd alongside a zippy green tomato chutney, verdant tips of basil and lacey white alyssum flowers seemed to emphasise their summery optimism.
Elsewhere, arrows of lemony French sorrel and jagged horseradish leaves crackle with flavour rarely encountered outside of backyard veggie patches. Ditto for the peppery bite of blushing baby radishes lightly dressed with olive oil and salt. A snip of rosemary brings perfume and colour to a vegetal fig leaf soda, one of many inspired non-alcoholic cordials and iced teas you might encounter. (Yes, cellar door restaurants! You can offer non-drinkers options beyond multinational colas and juices!)
Regeneratively grown produce aside, the McDonalds also raise sheep (a meat-specific breed called Sheepmaster) and pigs (Tamworths). You might spy a few of the latter frolicking in the mud on the drive in.
“This is made with the pigs we saw outside,” exclaimed a mother to her children as a slab of very good pate en croute appeared tableside.
“Well, not those pigs exactly.”
The pig in question probably didn’t look quite like this, its flesh coerced into a dense farce studded with macadamia nuts and sheathed in bacon and an amber gelee.
Lunch hits peak Glenarty with the main course. While farmers appreciate how low-maintenance a Sheepmaster animal is, the take-home for eaters is that the animal’s meat is juicy, rosy and deeply flavoured: or at least when its rump is grilled Argentine-style over fire and cleaved into thick, garnet slices.
The lamb comes with veggies sides, although it feels ungenerous to call smoky eggplant with whipped tahini, pomegranate and a syrupy vincotto as (just) a “side”. A fine-boned bitter chocolate tart teamed with medicinal feijoa ice cream is the perfect CWA-esque sweet to end on.
While Glenarty’s restaurant craft is strong – the relaxed, assured service under Georgia Badyk is bang-on for country lunching; local winemaker Bec Durham illuminates the cellar door – its MVP is its garden and the diverse array of pristine herbs, fruits and vegetables that head gardener Martine Surprenant and co sow and grow. For eaters that appreciate provenance and food that tastes of its ingredients, here’s a reassuring antidote to the bombastic, more-seasoning-more-seasoning! cooking that’s so prevalent nowadays.
Of course, not everyone has a productive, 240-hectare backyard at their disposal. (Having access to any sized backyard, full stop, seems hard enough.) I also accept that lunch at Glenarty is unquestionably a special occasion road trip. But one thing that is in reach of most eaters is taking steps to understand where our food comes from.
Buy your kale and lunchbox apples from a greengrocer. Get chatting with a grower at the farmer’s market – and not a middle person buying produce from a wholesale market – and be rewarded with a lesson on, say, the fluid sexuality of avocados. Pinch some lemons from your neighbour’s tree hanging over the fence. Buy some radish seeds and stick them in some soil. Not only will you eat better, but you’ll get a taste of what it takes to produce food and the importance of getting behind farmers and producers.
If we want a strong, robust local food scene, we’re going to have to work for it.
The low-down
Vibe: an inspiring farm-to-table restaurant serving one of the most important dining experiences in the state.
Go-to dish: the five-course Every Acre feast.
Drinks: estate wines that trip the grape fantastic from conventional to renegade; plus wines from guest producers and a terrific non-alcoholic drinks program.
Cost: about $260 for two people.
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Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
