Byron Bay restaurant Harvest Newrybar celebrates 15 years
With its farm-to-table philosophy and ecological awareness, the Harvest Newrybar has grown into an inspirational gourmet destination.
Have you ever eaten fruit straight off the tree? The ripeness, the sweetness, the flavour – it hits you at once, with that first bite, as it dawns on you that that is why everyone in the restaurant world bangs on so much about eating fresh, seasonal produce.
“Try this one – it looks good,” says farmer John Picone, passing me a sandpaper fig that when torn in half has a beautiful dark-red centre surely worthy of an artistic rendition. Next is an unbelievably succulent lychee, followed by a quarter of a blushing orange persimmon (who knew they could taste so good?), and a slice of hot pink-skinned dragon fruit that is refreshingly sweet and flavoursome.
After months of rain in the Northern Rivers region, the sky is blue and the sun has a sting in it as I eat my way through Picone’s exotic fruit orchard in the Byron Bay hinterland. As he takes me through this netted wonderland, he points out some of the 400 varieties he grows. There are the vanilla bean vines he hand-pollinates with a toothpick, and bulbous jackfruits so large they defy any kind of gravity to still be hanging on the tree (“they are not quite ready yet; give it a few weeks”).
“Whenever we take fruit from the tree, we say thank you to the tree,” says Picone, as he passes me a piece of translucent yellow starfruit he has just picked. As I bite into the crisp fruit I realise just how much this farmer of 40 years cares for and nurtures all his plants.
We are here because Picone’s daughter Kassia and her husband Tristan Grier are the owners of Harvest Newrybar, a restaurant, deli and bakery that has been championing the farm-to-table philosophy and local producers for 15 years. Harvest has not only transformed the tiny town of Newrybar – 20 minutes from Byron Bay – into a gourmet destination but has also garnered critical acclaim, hiring chefs who were creating simple, local and tasty seasonal food long before everyone else was.
“We are fortunate enough that we live in this food bowl so the obvious thing to do was to showcase the local produce,” Grier says. “It was also very much in tune with what we wanted to do, and that was to be all about community. For us to be successful here, it was always looking to the community of producers. Without them we wouldn’t have become what we have become. We provide the infrastructure and the inspiration, the chefs, farmers and producers provide everything else.”
Picone and his farm have been a part of Harvest from the beginning, not just in supplying the many different fruits and vegetables that have ended up on plates at the restaurant, but in the way Kass (as she likes to be called) approaches the business. “Tristan was hospitality driven from the start; he is absolutely a people person. Whereas I really grew up a farmer’s daughter,” she says. “My dad is Sicilian and born on the land, and it is everything to him. The first farm I grew up on was here on Friday Hut Road [just a few streets from Newrybar]. The only way I knew how to eat was to eat seasonally.”
The Harvest story actually begins quite a few years earlier when Grier decided to move to Byron Bay. The self-described “hospitality tragic” had grown up on the Northern Beaches in Sydney, studied hotel management, and spent a few years working in ski resorts here and in Canada as well as moonlighting as a ski instructor on the side in Falls Creek (just so that he could get a cheap lift pass).
“I wanted to get away from the winter season but get the same holiday town feeling so, I thought Byron Bay was the exact opposite of snow,” he tells me later over lunch at Harvest (sourdough bread cooked that day, salted butter, cheeses and meats from local producers, and a glass of rosé).
“I got to Byron in 2002 and worked at a restaurant called Fish Heads before getting a job at The Bower Room, which is now known as The Balcony. I was behind the bar and Kass was on the floor, and I clocked her on day one and I wore her down.”
Kass had also been working in hospitality, after studying Japanese and visual arts at Southern Cross University in Lismore (“I was one of those people who didn’t know what to do”) and the job that supported her through university turned into her profession when she realised it was her thing. “I would travel and come back to the area and work, and one of those times I met Tristan and the rest, as they say, is history,” she laughs. “We worked together as friends for a couple of years before we got together, and ended up moving to Port Douglas and running a restaurant up there. After a while we realised we cared more about this restaurant than the owner, so we decided to do something for ourselves and gravitated back to Byron Bay as Tristan’s parents had also moved here.”
They both started working at Harvest Cafe in Newrybar as waiters to save money to open their own place. Back then Harvest was casual and just known for its breakfasts. The original Queenslander building is 132 years old and had been a post office and a general store. Newrybar itself was founded in 1881, thanks to the burgeoning local logging industry and its location on the only road down the east coast. What is now the bakery – an adjacent building that houses a 121-year-old woodfired oven – was used as a storage room at the time Tristan and Kass started working there in 2007.
“The owner was very stressed, so we called a meeting with him one day and offered to run the place,” Tristan recalls. “But he said instead, do you want to buy it? We were 26 or 27, and we thought we wanted to do fine dining and be in Byron Bay among it all. At the time,Harvest was just a café known for its breakfasts; not very cool. It wasn’t all the things we were looking for.”
They went home and started talking about it, and the more they talked the more they realised the potential of that old Queenslander as a property and Newrybar as a town. “That building was derelict,” Grier says, pointing to what is now the bakery. “This veranda section we are sitting in wasn’t here. Someone was living in the house right next door, what is now the deli. We thought it was a really, really good opportunity, and there were endless possibilities for this space and what it could mean to people and the local community, and we saw this as a long-term project.”
So they bought the business. One of the first things they did in the early days was to hire a new chef as the pair are an unusual combination in the restaurant world in that neither of them cook. “We are both front of house, which is not ideal for a hospitality partnership,” laughs Kass. “Everyone is always asking me, which one of you is in the kitchen? And I have to say, neither of us! But we both love creating an experience, an aesthetic and an ambience for a venue. Organisation and attention to detail is my area and Tristan loves people, so we just fit.”
The first chef they took on was Joseph Griffin, who was all about serving good, seasonal and local produce. He started by simply barbecuing fresh prawns out on the deck. The community took notice and started coming in to check out Harvest for more than just coffee or avocado on toast.
“The food trends we tapped into even then were leaning more and more towards the produce being the hero, rather than what do to it and the sauces you add to it,” explains Tristan. “So we started to do better, cleaner food with better service and a better wine list, and moved from being that breakfast place to becoming that lunch place. That’s when we started seeing people from beyond the local area. We would ask them where they came from and they would say Brisbane.”
Harvest went on to win critical acclaim, hit a number of top best food and wine lists, and even scored a hat under the chefs who worked at the restaurant in the next 15 years. Some of the highlights include Bret Cameron (who scored the hat), as well as Alistair Waddell, who worked with wild food researcher and forager Peter Hardwick to craft an indigenous ingredient menu and put the town of Newrybar, and to a broader extent the Byron Bay region, on the radar of foodies across the country.
“Harvest has always been a platform,” Tristan says of working with different chefs, bakers, waiters, sommeliers and gardeners – all the staff who have come through Harvest. “For other people to grow, a platform for our local community and also a platform for people to springboard out of here. We have come to realise Harvest is bigger than any of us; it has its own heart and its own soul.”
Harvest has also grown quite substantially since Tristan and Kass took it over in 2007. After it evolved from a casual spot to more of a dining destination, they opened a deli and café in the house next door. Locals now grab coffee and breakfast there, plus a whole lot of amazing produce from local farmers. There is also a meat fridge and a cheese fridge that displays everything from dry-aged beef to ducks (it was being used to store food for flood relief when I visited, as Harvest was cooking meals and sending them to affected people in Lismore).
The couple also restored and completely rebuilt the extraordinary 121-year-old woodfired oven in 2010 and reopened the bakery. The constantly burning oven bakes close to 1000 loaves of sourdough a week, as well as croissants and other delicious pastries (I may or may not have eaten two almond croissants in an obscenely short space of time.) The bakery is also an event space.
The kitchen gardens came later, as did what Grier calls the village green – a lawn area where people can have picnics, Harvest can hold events and locals can just enjoy relaxing there. There is also the less beautiful but arguably more important recycling station, composting and grey-water treatment facility. Being sustainable and ecologically aware is almost as central to Harvest as the farm-to-table philosophy.
This approach has attracted the likes of renowned zero-waste chefs Matt Stone and Jo Barrett (Stone has since moved on and will be replaced by Lilly Trewartha), as well as chef David Moyle, who joined in 2020 and is now creative director across all of Harvest’s food endeavours. Moyle is all about showcasing produce simply, and connecting to the farmers, producers and the land. Born in Port Fairy, three hours from Melbourne, he started at the legendary Italian restaurant Marchetti’s Latin in 1996 and was head chef at uber cool Circa, The Prince in St Kilda, heading a team of 30 chefs by the time he was 25.
“I was working 90 hours a week and I was exhausted, so in 2007 I came up to Byron Bay looking for a bit of a change and to really get that link to producers,” Moyle says. “That is when it all started; when I realised, am I just opening packets of food and cooking it to perfection or am I trying to connect with the food I am cooking? It turned into a crisis of confidence where I needed to go to Tasmania and live off the grid and open a restaurant called Stackings. We ended up getting best regional restaurant in the country with me in the kitchen and two people on the floor.”
Moyle went on to open Franklin in Hobart, before being enticed back to Byron Bay by Tristan and Kass to run all things food and beverage. He is drawn to using simple ingredients and making them shine, paring dishes back to the basics and allowing the quality of produce to be the star of the meal.
“Food is about staples, it is about what feeds us every day,” he says, his passion about what he believes in obvious. “I have an obsession about serving things on rice, bread and potatoes – these staples that should be celebrated more as exceptional, but we have reduced them and turned them into white bread and bleached, washed rice. Those staples are key to civilisation; why can’t they be represented in the best possible way? Why can’t they be caviar? When something is grown well without intervention, it should be presented in its most simple fashion to show the value.”
We have this conversation as Moyle cooks me a meal at Harvest House, beautiful accommodation a short drive from Newrybar and an extension of the Harvest experience (the pantry is stocked with wine, food and cheese from local producers and almost tops the stunning view over the hinterland and coast). Moyle turns up with only a few ingredients, but they are exceptional: locally grown organic rice, fresh prawns and eel, from which he makes the most delicious Japanese-inspired food.
“The ritualism of cooking; respect for ingredients, treating everything singularly, is hugely important to me,” he says as we eat. “How things work together and how they stay individual, that’s how I like to cook. Like tonight’s meal with the prawns, eel and rice. The best cuisines to me are Japanese and Italian. There is no fuss, no pretence, just a few key ingredients. It’s easy to make something taste nice if you chuck lots of flavours at it but it’s way more interesting to pare it right back.”
Again, it seems everything at Harvest comes back to the quality of the ingredients. Like the Griers, Moyle spends lots of time with producers up in the Northern Rivers and finding ways to support them. Luckily, he says, they are spoiled for choice, because not only do chefs clamour for all the amazing things that are grown in the region – from macadamia nuts to coffee to rice to exotic fruit – but the locals support growers too through the farmers markets that take place several times a week.
This is also why Moyle is very happy about the next step Tristan and Kass are taking: buying her father’s farm Picone Exotic Fruits. Harvest will be truly farm-to-table as the couple takes over operations and find ways to use all the species John grows every season.
“We did have a farm a very long time ago so that is why getting on the Picone farm is really important,” Tristan says on the drive to the property. “We are very excited about taking it over. Kass is going to sit with her dad and get all the information from him so nothing is lost from his years of farming. And that is what Jo Barrett is going to do, find ways to use all the extraordinary produce.”
Later, eating yet again, I bite into the sweet, creamy flesh of a Mexican fruit called mamey sapote – which spends a year ripening on a tree – and I realise it’s going to be quite something to see what the Griers and their team do with this produce, this farm and Harvest in the next 15 years.