Crab Carnival 2018 at The Balcony Bar, Byron Bay

“Are you sure you want to go out in this weather?” he asks. “Crabs!” I reply. Just one word. It’s enough to get us moving from the comfort of the lounge, out into a storm wild enough to blow crabs up onto the beach; not enough deterrent, though, to keep us from eating crabs with […]

Winter Solstice Dinner at Mavis’s Kitchen

As we reach the shortest day of the year, winter chills creep in as the sun sinks behind the hills. We linger in tracky dacks, loathe to venture out, content to reach for comfort food in the shelter of warm homes. The winter solstice or ‘Yuletide’ marks a turning point from which days get longer, […]

Opera at Mavis’s Kitchen

Many storms are followed by a rainbow. When we gather on a bright winter’s day in June for a long table lunch beside the lake at Mavis’s Kitchen, we are thinking celebration. But the sobering trip along the Tweed reminds us of the devastation caused by the flood just two months before. Grass, beaten into […]

A Tuscan Night

It’s a magical night under a full moon in an Italian vineyard lit by fairy lights and candles; a sumptuous Italian feast accompanied by prosecco spritzers, our entertainment a string quartet, ballet and opera. This is the Gold Coast at its best – a balmy evening, a fairly casual event celebrating talent we rarely see. […]

Mavis’s Wild Food Garden Feast

It was to be a ‘wild food’ garden feast – five courses made from local and hyper-local produce held in the gardens of the magnificent Mavis’s Kitchen, Uki. As the sun descended on the afternoon, seventy people gathered to have a dinner with friends and strangers at two long linen-clad tables strewn with magnolia branches, […]

Saltwater, a story journey through food

Saltwater is a baptism by immersion experience of the gentlest kind. Disarmingly simple yet overlain with cultural intent, Saltwater brings together several known experiences to make a completely new one: a shared table dinner with conversation led by Singaporean Australian performance artist Jamie Lewis, brought to us by the Bleach Festival. Some of our most […]

Discovering the Scenic Rim

Defined by a rim of mountains circling the area west of the Gold Coast, the Scenic Rim covers 4,000 square kilometres of land, a diverse area of natural beauty which includes six national parks, three lakes and many areas of fertile, arable land. It’s the source of a much of our food supply and food […]