Millbrook Winery, Outside Perth, Is a Locavore Wonderland

JARRAHDALE, Western Australia — The narrative is irresistible: a chef who grows almost every ingredient on your plate, who saves seeds from year to year, and coaxes beautiful meals from the same verdant land you gaze upon as you eat.

This is the story of Millbrook Winery and its chef, Guy Jeffreys. Millbrook is on a 300-acre winery of the same name in Jarrahdale, Western Australia, about a 50-minute drive from Perth. Mr. Jeffries took over the kitchen at Millbrook nine years ago, and has attracted much attention for his food and the fact that he buys no produce for his restaurant. Almost all of it — fruit, grains, vegetables and herbs — is grown on the grounds by the chef and his kitchen staff. Oil is made from the fruit of olive trees on the property. Meat and fish, bought whole and butchered at Millbrook, come from nearby farms and fisheries.

This dynamic reinforces a truth the food world has grappled with since the early moments of the locavore movement: that to grow and serve the freshest food is a prohibitively expensive undertaking, and that morals, aesthetic preferences and economics don’t always play nicely together. This, in turn, usually means that only the very wealthy are able to partake in meals with such rigorous restrictions on the provenance of its ingredients.

That you can eat a meal at Millbrook, one that expresses the specific terroir of this lovely pocket of Western Australia, for as little as $50, is somewhat of a miracle. It could not happen at a regular restaurant. It could not happen without a chef and cooks willing to work double-duty, in the kitchen and in the field. It could not happen on land that wouldn’t support such a huge variety of fruits and vegetables.

For more details click : https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/dining/millbrook-winery-australia-review.html

#general