Three Blue Ducks’ new Bowral venue claims highest NSW Good Food score of the year

If you’ve been to the Three Blue Ducks at Byron Bay, you’ll know it as a place of agricultural education, roaming farm animals, croissants and casual lunches with a view to working fields. If that Northern Rivers site is a Disneyland of pickles and fresh produce, the Three Blue Ducks’ Burradoo Park Farm home is its even more ambitious Disney World cousin in the south.

Since opening at Easter, five minutes’ drive from Bowral, it has been a bigger Southern Highlands tourism drawcard than Don Bradman’s bat and the Big Potato combined. Guests visiting at peak times on weekends will need to book a free ticket to access the cafe, retail shop, bakery, gelateria, glasshouses, walking tours, educational kitchen garden, playground, workshops and exhibition on the majesty of bees. The money and initiative behind the project comes from billionaire Annie Cannon-Brookes.

I’m sure Burradoo Park is a delightful way to learn about dirt and cows, but for the purposes of this column, I want to talk about the Three Blue Ducks restaurant inside a restored 1823 heritage farmhouse. Seven courses cost $210, and it was one of the most cohesive tasting menus I’ve had this year.

An opening “warm welcome” of clarified chicken broth – made with the bones of big healthy chooks who spent a good life running (relatively) free – sets the tone for a highly comforting three hours in the hands of invested staff pouring low-intervention wine for day-trippers and Henschke for locals. Rock oysters come with a sorbet of sorrel stems dusted with native pepper (the combination works!); trout roe is marinated in beetroot until it’s a vibrant shade of boysenberry, and spooned into a crisp thimble-sized shell of blitzed radicchio; the crunchier part of bitter-green puntarelle is lightly pickled in sake vinegar and stuffed with a blend of chilli mayonnaise and raw red-spot prawns.

This is very cheffy stuff, and much different than the Three Blue Ducks healthy salads and family-friendly grilling at Byron Bay and Rosebery. Ducks co-founder Darren Robertson, who worked for eight years at Tetsuya’s, rising to head chef, must dig getting back to his roots. While Robertson tends to other Ducks ventures, former Quay head chef Troy Crisante runs the kitchen with Rhys Connell, who held senior roles at three-hatted Sepia. Fine-dining Avengers, assemble.

A cover crop salad inspired by Burradoo Park’s regenerative farming practices, where crops are planted to improve the soil, is an early signature. An artisan ceramic bowl holds the many textures of sprouted grains, legumes, barley and field peas, and it’s supremely tasty stuff, largely thanks to a blanket of fermented turnip-boosted beurre blanc and garlic chive oil. Like most dishes here, it will evolve over the weeks and seasons.

On my visit in August, an assiette of Australian White-breed lamb (raised with their mothers 200 metres from the restaurant) featured braised shoulder, cutlet cooked on the bone, butter-poached haunch and sweetbreads poached in a coffee-flavoured nage for extra richness.