Centurion Magazine 

August 2008

Creating a stir

It's a wintery Monday in country Victoria and one of the most talked-about kitchen talents in Australia is picking wild mushrooms on his day off. The slippery jacks and pine mushrooms Dan Hunter collects from windbreaks and pine plantations will hit the table at Dunkeld's Royal Mail Hotel, where he is the executive chef, and a few will even find their way into his dinner this evening. "We have a fantastic dish the menu; wild mushrooms with parsnip, smoked leek and bone marrow," he says, thoughts returning to work. "It pretty much sums up where we are right now, with cultivated vegetables from the garden, some bone marrow, which is quite a big flavour but delicate in the way that it's almost like a jelly, and then wild mushrooms that we pick ourselves three or four times a week. It's just a great summary of the season."

It is what the 34-year-old chef's style of cuisine focuses on: using the best seasonal produce. And here, 260 km from Melbourne, he has much at his disposal. There's the kitchen garden at the Royal Mail that he's taken charge of since arriving here in August last year (using baby vegetables and shoots in his dishes is something of a Hunter trademark), orchards throughout the town, yabbies in the dam, and sheep and cattle producers in the surrounding area.

For all that though, there is another reason Hunter has attracted so many column inches in the media. After training in Melbourne at such restaurants as Langton's and Verge, he travelled to Spain. Here, he landed what was essentially an internship at one of the world's best restaurants, Mugaritz in San Sebastian (it came in at number four on UK Restaurant Magazine's top 50 list this year). The chef there, Andoni Luiz Aduriz, trained with the famed Ferran Adria, and the restaurant has a kitchen garden, which showed Hunter the possibilities of the rigorously planned plantings. Two years later he was head chef. "I was staggered when I heard that he was running Mugaritz," says Jeremy Strode. Hunter's former boss at Langton's. "It wasn't that I thought he couldn't do it, but is was unheard of for an aussie to be running a two-star Michelin restaurant.

"I think he's an old soul, as well as very calm," continues Strode. "It suits what he's doing because it takes a really deep understanding of produce - where it comes from and what it is - to achieve what he has."

Hunter has a low-key take on molecular gastronomy that has nothing to do with flashy foams and smoking desserts. "Our food has a lot of textural interest and we try to create a balance of textures. We spend a lot of time focusing on the correct cooking temperature and time," he explains. Meat and fish are prepared at a low temperature for a long time rather than being blasted with hear: "What we're doing is almost like setting the protein." In a review, respected critic John Lethlean waxed lyrical about this particular technique: "Perhaps the most complex of the savoury dishes is Hunter's rare-roasted lamb rump, another triumph of his low-temperature approach. Never have I tasted such an emphatically lamby piece of lamb...I can still taste it weeks later, while its texture - juicy, rich, firm, yet remarkably tender in the mouth - continues to perplex."

"As far as I'm aware, there's a lot of emphasis placed on fireworks and technique that is really obvious, then there is this," says Hunter, "which I think is a more important technique because it results in a better meal. That's not to say we don't give a lot of attention to presentation, because we do, but I think for the past couple of years a lot of chefs have spent their time delving into molecular gastronomy, but more in the sense of presentation and things that are basic to learn but trick the public in a way. We take the approach of finding something that furthers the experience of the diner."

Guests of the fine dining arm of the Royal Mail (there's also a café and pub, where Hunter oversees the food) choose from either a five or ten course tasting menu or an eight course vegetarian option. Asked to name a favourite dish, Hunter instead says that the aspect he is most proud of is the menu's balance: "The third course, the eighth course, the tenth course all have the same impact as the first. It's not an up and down roller-coaster ride, it's just a smooth ride into the horizon." Equally impressive is the wine list. Running to 79 pages, it's the collection, reputably worth millions, of the hotel's owner, Allan Myers, a local boy made good. There are plans to update the dining room later in the year to complete the experience.

These elements, along with the accolades he's been receiving, have reinforced Hunter's dedication to his country restaurant. "You get used to things (in the country) you can't normally use and create a style of food that almost wouldn't work in the city because of the time it takes to get produce to a restaurant. We don't put things in the fridge here. We go into the garden, cut things, wash and prepare them and serve them. There's just something wholesome about it."

Carrie Hutchinson