These are the best restaurants in Tasmania, as reviewed for our annual Restaurant Guide.
Tasmania’s culinary scene continues to thrive with warmhearted Italian restaurants in Hobart, glorious destination fine-diners and cool drinking dens just up from Salamanca Bay. The state may be small, but the best restaurants Tasmania has rival many of the top eateries around the country.
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Here, provenance and personality are drivers behind the Apple Isle’s top restaurants. And it’s no wonder, with Tasmania home to sensational produce, cool-climate wine and artisanal small goods. Here’s where to eat in Tasmania on your next trip.
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The Agrarian Kitchen Restaurant | New Norfolk
Seven years in and The Agrarian Kitchen Restaurant is more alive than ever, now that it’s flanked by the famed cooking school, a first-class takeaway kiosk and the one-acre walled kitchen garden where your lunch begins. From the opener of just-picked crudités to the closing delicata-squash miso caramels, freshness and purity are the constants, shaped by an uncompromising everything-from-scratch approach. Fleshy red peppers taste sweeter and truer in their own vinegar. Lemon miso gives house-made burrata an assertively tart backbone. A hand-pressed tostada with preserved albacore and dried pasilla chillies practically vibrates with the flavour of locally grown Oaxacan green corn. Whole-animal butchery, a comprehensive kefir-cultured cheese program and a Tassie-centric drinks list with unrivalled alcohol-free options round out the ethos-driven offering, backed by a professional young team that’s ardently invested in it all. And who wouldn’t be? This is dining with deep-seated integrity, at the height of its aspirational powers.
theagrariankitchen.com
Australian
11A The Avenue, New Norfolk
(03) 6262 0011
Price guide $$$
Bookings Essential
Wheelchair access Yes
Open Lunch Fri-Sun
Fico | Hobart
Consider the opener at Fico – a carrot and cumin gazpacho, scented with orange oil, tarragon and capers – a quiet declaration. It says something like: Here are some flavours and ideas you know well, combined in ways you didn’t see coming. And so it is for much of the loosely Italian nine-course menu, which dares to follow defiantly al dente Muscovy duck agnolotti in a green-cardamom sauce with a perfectly sculpted wild hare pithivier. Every taste and texture on the plate is ruthlessly interrogated, yet for every left-of-centre move they make, chefs Federica Andrisani and Oskar Rossi never lose sight of the fundamentals. Their towering tin-shaped sourdough loaf is uncompromisingly fluffy, and even the pangrattato scattered over hand-cut taglioni with tender calamari brims with uncommon freshness and crunch. These smarts extend to steady-handed service and a simpatico Franco-Italo-Tasmanian wine list, adding up to an experience that should top every Hobart diner’s dance card.
Even if you have clear ideas about what a restaurant at the rear of a Lexus showroom might look and feel like, chances are Omotenashi will defy them in almost every way. At this unlikeliest of 10-seat counter set-ups, young dynamos Sophie Pope and Lachlan Colwill present a highly personal vision of the kaiseki meal, anchored by intimate knowledge of Japanese technique and Tasmanian produce. Throughout the evening, the couple takes turns cooking and serving, topping up smartly paired sakes and telling stories about the Edo-era lacquerware. If there’s a running theme, it’s impeccable ingredients treated with monastic simplicity: resplendent crayfish sashimi and high-toned ponzu; peak-ripe figs and tomatoes tossed through dashi jelly; a spot-on broad-bean miso soup. Even a humble bowl of rice is taken to a higher plane with yellow-eye mullet and mustard cress. In lesser hands, this might all be stale and self-regarding. Instead, it’s improbable, inspired and downright incredible.
Culinary director Massimo Mele and his team can hand-roll cavatelli with the best of them and crisp up the skin of the pesce del giorno just so. What really breathes life into their cooking at Peppina, though, is the network of growers and makers that headlines the menu. Puffy pizza fritta may be virtuous in its own right, yet finds a higher key thanks to a ravishingly fresh, scapece-style smashed zucchini dip. A salad of thick-cut tomatoes and baby cucumbers epitomises produce at its pinnacle, with just a few fresh herbs and a glug of lovage oil added for good measure. Note-perfect wood-fired polpette in slushy tomato sugo, meanwhile, put paid to the notion that humble trattoria hits hold no place in a ritzy hotel restaurant. For best results, book a night at The Tasman, mine the cellar’s abundant riches with gusto, then relish the splendour of the sprawling dining room by daylight over breakfast.
Even on a low-season Monday night, there isn’t a spare seat in the house. Unfailingly upbeat and attentive service may be one reason; the enduring warmth of the restored mill – framed by stone walls, timber beams and Tamar River views – another. That 200-strong wine list doesn’t hurt either, with the island’s finest holding sway. Then, of course, there’s chef-owner Craig Will’s work in the kitchen, which follows its own logic but always ends up in delicious places. That might be somewhere Japanese in a gutsy bowl of garlicky udon tossed with tender octopus, tamari, fried chilli and fluttering katsuobushi. Or closer to home in the case of seared wallaby, given native sensibility by way of lemon myrtle, bush pepper and smoked macadamia cream. A dynamite dessert offsetting poached rhubarb and rhubarb ice-cream with burnt honey, maple cream and lemon-verbena granita nails the summer-to-autumn transition and confirms Stillwater still sets standards, a quarter century on.
