Seasonal Australian cooking by Chef Iris Hennessy and a small team. Open daily for breakfast and dinner — vegetarian and gluten-free always represented on the day's menu.
The kitchen runs to one rule — if the produce did not grow within two hundred kilometres, it does not earn a place on the dinner menu. The result is a list that changes monthly: stone fruit in February, a long shoulder of slow-roast Mt Pleasant lamb in July, the first asparagus in September.
Chef Iris Hennessy trained at Brae and then at a quiet table in Tasmania before settling in Orange three winters ago. She writes the menu on a Sunday, walks the farmers' market on Wednesday, and signs off the wine pairings with the sommelier on Thursday afternoon. There is no signature dish; there is only the one she is cooking this week.
Service is unhurried. We will hold your table for the full evening if you would like to take it slowly — which is, mostly, the suggestion.
A working cellar — not a museum. Two hundred and twenty bottles, one hundred and forty of them within a forty-kilometre radius of the property. Flights at dinner from five-thirty; bottle-shop service for the room or the road home.
A snapshot of the list. The sommelier rotates a third of the cellar each quarter — older bottles to the back, the season's openings to the front.
Cool-climate chardonnay, shiraz, pinot gris and an emerging cabernet franc scene.
Mudgee, Cowra and the Hunter's outer reaches — the longer-aged reds.
Margaret River, the Yarra, Tasmania — for the pairings the region cannot yet field.
A short Burgundy column, a small Champagne shelf, a handful of Northern Italian whites.
"I write the menu on a Sunday, around the market, around the cellar, and around whatever the kitchen garden is doing that month. There is no signature; there is the way we cook this particular week."
Iris trained at Brae for two summers, then ran a quiet pass at a small place in Tasmania for four years. She joined the property in 2023 and has been the menu's only author since.
Chef de cuisine · since March 2023The kind of dinner that ends slowly and lasts on the way home.We rebooked at breakfast.