Looking for good food on your weekend away? Don't leave your hotel

Whenever anyone asks where they should eat when travelling around Australia, I have one simple answer. Just eat in your hotel. You should see their faces. Then I say, “But make sure you’ve booked the right hotel.”

The hotel restaurant used to be the last place you’d book for dinner, unless you liked Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and chicken marsala on rotation. But something has shifted, in the mindset of both hoteliers and their guests. Now, the restaurant in the hotel is likely to be a dining destination in its own right, somewhere that speaks of the city or region it’s in, as opposed to the international cookie-cutter approach of the past.

Hellenika restaurant, on the first-floor pool deck of Brisbane's The Calile.Credit: Toby Scott

Now, you stay at The Calile in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley because the ever-buzzing Hellenika restaurant on the first-floor pool deck just seems so … Brisbane. The food from chef Bryan Kelly might be modern Greek – orzo with spanner crab, wagyu pastitsio – but the setting for Simon Gloftis’ second Hellenika outpost is an “urban resort” of private poolside cabanas and towering palm trees that makes you feel you’re right here in River City.

We don’t travel just to get somewhere that’s the same as everywhere else. We travel for the magic of the “there”, the qualities that make it “there” and not here. So while there’s plenty else to do on the Mornington Peninsula, most of those booking the 46 rooms at Jackalope Hotel, which gave the region such a rush of excitement when it opened in 2017, are staying in. They’re in the Doot Doot Doot restaurant drinking wines from vineyards seen through the window, while dining on Guy Stanaway’s marron with confit potato, the spuds pulled from local peninsula soil.

It’s especially poignant when you look forward to a rural weekend but get fobbed off with some well-meaning facsimile of urban life instead. You need birdsong, towering eucalypts, clear night skies and the chance to get close to native wildlife, even if it’s at the local bowls club on a Friday night. Which brings me to Brae in Birregurra (I wish), where Dan Hunter and Julianne Bagnato have won multiple awards for being the best restaurant in the country (regional Australia) and the country (Australia).

But here’s the rub. You’d be mad to come here and just eat, without taking advantage of the carefully sourced wine list as well. So, who gets the short straw and has to play designated driver? Nobody, if you nab one of the six guest suites, each featuring organic cotton bed linen, cocktail bar, turntable and vinyl record collection, underfloor heating and temperature-controlled wine fridge. (Tip: book lunch in the restaurant, and “stay in” for dinner.)

Great Ocean duck from Parker Street Project at the Royal Mail Hotel.Credit: Emily Weaving

Likewise, the Royal Mail Hotel in western Victoria’s Dunkeld has a 28,000-bottle cellar and a wine list that has won the Grand Award in Wine Spectator’s Restaurant Wine List Awards for five consecutive years. Let’s face it, you’re there for the wine as much as for the lovely two-hatted cooking of Robin Wickens, who sources much of the menu from the hotel’s vast gardens for both the fine diner and the more casual Parker Street Project. They’ll package up a five-course dinner, breakfast and a cellar tour with the sommelier when you book both bed and board.

Then there’s Biota, James Viles’ fiercely locavore restaurant in Bowral, in the NSW Southern Highlands, with its own 12 well-appointed rooms and the added bonus of a Biota breakfast thrown in as part of its stay and dine packages. Nor can we forget the grande dame of restaurants with rooms, the 35-year-old Lake House in Daylesford. It’s a magnificent country scene in itself, with 33 rooms and suites set in 2.5 hectares of garden extending down to the waters of Lake Daylesford. You’d want to stay here even if it didn’t have two chef’s hats in the Good Food Guide and highly seasonal dishes such as chestnut gnocchi with forest mushrooms, buttermilk-cooked Black Berkshire pork, and local plums with yoghurt parfait. That’s Daylesford on a plate, right there.

It’s a world away from the fish baked in local kelp with coastal herbs at Paper Daisy, the relaxed but glam dining room of Halcyon House on northern NSW’s Cabarita Beach, or chef Jason Saxby’s coastal vibes at Rae’s on Wategos in Byron Bay – which is exactly the point. The growing strength of our regional offerings means our chefs are cooking with a greater sense of place, using the area’s unique plants and produce as points of difference that we travel to discover.

A plate from Doot Doot Doot.Credit: Sharyn Cairns

We’ve also seen a fresh redefinition of ye olde room service. At Pumphouse Point, set in the middle of Lake St Clair in Tasmania, rooms in the 1930s former hydro-electric landmark are stocked with local cheese, charcuterie and home-made soups sourced from Coal River Farm. In Perth, former Wildflower chef Jed Gerrard promises to do bespoke, coal-fired breakfasts in the new Ritz-Carlton’s showpiece restaurant, Hearth, when it opens on November 15. Meanwhile, guests at Sydney’s Paramount House Hotel can order lamb burgers and cheese toasties to the room from Mat Lindsay’s Poly wine bar and restaurant below, just as those at Chippendale’s Old Clare Hotel can chow down on salt beef bagels, dips, pickles and Turkish bread from two-hatted chef Clayton Wells’ A1 Canteen across the laneway.

In Melbourne, you can dine on spanner crab with prawn butter and flatbread from Scott Pickett’s acclaimed Matilda 59 Domain, or have the butler set up a table in your room at the chic, apartment-style United Places Botanic Gardens boutique hotel instead.

The hotel restaurant now comes with such cachet that top chefs are happily teaming up with like-minded hotel groups. Witness the Three Blue Ducks outpost at the very zoomy W Brisbane, with its dazzling views and late-night bar scene. How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after that? Initiatives such as these are shaking up the hotel industry and giving the idea of a weekend away all the fun of an adult sleepover.

But it’s the final gesture of the night that is the most delightful, with but a short walk to your pillow. No taxi required; no waiting on the kindness or commerce of others. Just sleep, glorious sleep, interspersed with dreams of bacon and eggs for breakfast.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.