Sunshine Coast’s Curated Plate food festival set to stun

From locally grown coffee and a vast array of fruits, to lipsmacking alcoholic beverages and top notch Asian cuisine, this major South East Queensland food festival has truly raised its game.

Peter Kuruvita, second right, is the festival’s first culinary director.

Set on Kabi Kabi and Jinibara land, spanning west from Bribie Island, deep into the lush hinterland and north to Noosa, the Sunshine Coast’s Curated Plate Festival is a gastronome’s delight.

This year the festival boasts its first culinary director – celebrity chef and Sunshine Coast local Peter Kuruvita – who brings more than four decades of experience to the table.

Over 10 jam-packed days from July 25 to August 3, guests can choose from more than 90 events highlighting the producers, growers and chefs of the region.

I participated in a preview of some of the festival’s best-selling events, beginning in a rainforest setting at Maleny’s Spicers Tamarind Retreat. An outdoor preview of the festival’s signature Asian Food event, to be hosted at the retreat, was planned for our first night, though with rain setting in it smoothly transitioned to an indoor affair that offered a focus on some top-notch eats.

The head chefs of three of the coast’s premier Asian restaurants, Tom Hitchcock of Spirit House at Yandina, James Fraser of Rice Boi at Mooloolaba and Tamarind Retreat’s own Dan Jarrett gave us a delicious taste of the bites they have planned for the Asian food event.

Wagyu phat skewers at Spicers Tamarind Retreat.

From Spirit House’s Indonesian satay, blackened phat wagyu skewers, to Rice Boi’s black sesame prawn toast with mandarin dashi caramel and a goma shabu mayo to my standout dish, The Tamarind and Maleny Food Co’s Thai tea sundae, every bite was an ode to the region and its riches.

It wouldn’t be a real event without some top-notch booze traders joining the party, with the event perfectly pairing with Brouhaha Brewery (their strawberry rhubarb sour is a game-changer), Sunshine and Sons Distillery and Barossa-based but locally distributed Brockenchack Wines.

After enjoying a deeply relaxing evening in one of Spicers’ villas, where I took great advantage of a child-free night and the divine interiors complete with hearth and a tub and the most luxurious mattress, another day of culinary extravagance awaited.

Taste the best of what the region has to offer.

There’s seafood aplenty to try.

We kicked off at Yanalla Farms at Beerwah, a specialist farm that is home to sprawling lychee, dragonfruit and custard apple crops, including their signature Instagrammable PinksBlush variety, where a squadron of the region’s top producers awaited us. In a speed-date take on the festival’s Mad Hatter Tea Party and the Celebrate Glasshouse Country Long Lunch, both set in the lychee orchard at Yanalla, we met dozens of the men and women who are growing, crafting and developing the Sunshine Coast’s best bites.

It was here we discovered, among a raft of other delights, that the Sunshine Coast is home to not one but two coffee growers, and is quickly making a name for itself as one of the country’s best regions for it, despite the fact that less than 1 per cent of the world’s coffee is grown in Australia.

Veteran grower Keith Murray, owner of Glasshouse Eco Lodge and the Glasshouse Mountain Coffee Project, has been in the game for almost 20 years, and grows the region’s first coffee beans, on a relatively small scale. Joining him are new kids on the block, Glasshouse Plantation, a small, family-operated farm that is set to harvest its first crop of beans from more than 5000 trees – which take three years from planting to picking – late this year.

Glasshouse Plantation has impressively secured the growing rights to several exclusive beans from across the globe, one controlled by Nestle, another controlled by Kenya and is in negotiations with the Guatemalan government to secure rights to another variety.

It’s hard to top off a morning of locally-sourced produce like the aforementioned coffee or lamb bacon and kabana, ham steaks, eggs and every other breakfast food under the sun, but an afternoon and evening spent experiencing the coast’s highest-quality seafood through an inspiring cultural immersion and then an ultra-fun degustation were both strong contenders.

Aunty Bridgette at Saltwater Eco Tours

The wet weather that had been dampening our spirits put the kybosh on our adventure on the Saltwater Eco Tours waterway dining experience, but the team quickly pivoted and welcomed us inside their beautifully redecorated booking office and storefront to enjoy their on-board menu, and a touching welcome to country by First Nation’s elder Aunty Bridgette Chilli.

As Aunty Bridgette shared a moving insight into the First Nation’s perspective and experience, we dined on course after course of incredible food, remarkably primarily cooked on a sandwich press.

Even though we couldn’t board a vessel named Spray of the Coral Coast, a replica of the boat used by Joshua Slocum, the first person to circumnavigate the globe single-handedly in 1898, and enjoy our feast on the seas, the bush tucker-infused chilli margs went a long way to boosting our spirits – spiked with Davidson plum and native pepperberry.

Grape vs. Grain event at Fish on Parkyn

Switching things up once more, we embarked on the battle of the brews at the Grape vs. Grain event at Fish on Parkyn.

Here we enjoyed a seafood-heavy, five-course meal, with each course paired with a brew from Ten Toes Brewing Co and Brockenchack Wines.

The full program is available now.

The writer was a guest of Tourism Sunshine Coast

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The Curated Plate

July 25 to August 3

thecuratedplate.com.au