COMMUNITY X KYLIE

Kylie Kwong celebrates the individuals helping to grow a stronger community. This month we meet Rodney Dunn, the man behind Tasmania’s beloved restaurant and cooking school, The Agrarian Kitchen.

Rodney Dunn.

Rodney Dunn is living out his River Cottage fantasy. The chef and horticulturalist is the heart and mind behind The Agrarian Kitchen, Tasmania’s beloved cooking school and restaurant, where simple produce takes centre stage. It began with an old schoolhouse, which became home to another type of education, as Dunn started teaching guests about charcuterie, baking and butchery, amongst an array of other topics. It’s a dream Dunn came to live out in a roundabout kind of way.

As a kid, growing up in a small town just south of Griffith in NSW, Dunn always loved to cook. “I’m one of four boys and from a very young age cooking was just a thing for us,” he says. “We lived out of town, so we couldn’t go to the local fish and chip shop when we were hungry. Mum would always say ‘why don’t you just cook something?’”

Dunn started working in restaurants around Griffith to build up work experience in the kitchen. But when his 18th birthday rolled around, he decided it was time to leave the country for the bright

lights of Sydney. The stars aligned when the young cook spotted an advert for a chef role at Tetsuya’s. “We drove down for the interview in the morning, and all the way back in the afternoon. I’m talking like six hours one way,” he says. “I sat down with Tets for roughly 20 minutes, and he asked me if I could start the following week. So I went home, packed up my things, moved into my friend’s apartment in Bondi and that was it. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”

For Dunn, the experience was a whirlwind. It was the people he met along the way, however, that saw him side-step from the world of restaurants into food media. “The thing I loved about it most was the experimentation; I loved developing a recipe and just doing different things all the time, and with different people.”

This eventually led Dunn to the role of food editor at Gourmet Traveller, where he represented the magazine on his first trip to Tasmania. It was on this trip, combined with an episode of River Cottage, that sparked an idea.

“It was such a special place. There was a raw connection with food, gardens and provenance. So my wife Séverine and I just thought: we should move to Tassie,” says Dunn. “Our apartment in Newtown at the time had a couple of garden beds with herbs, and we tried to grow things but it was just pointless. We were at a stage where we were ready to move out of Sydney,” he recalls.

Dunn and Séverine stumbled upon an old schoolhouse sitting on two hectares of land near the town of Lachlan. Fourteen years on, and that schoolhouse, which is also their home, is now surrounded by lush gardens teeming with brassicas and kale; orchards hosting peaches, apricots and 30 varieties of apple; a veggie patch filled with carrots, turnips and tomatoes; and a working farm with pigs and sheep.

“You don’t really realise how far you’ve come until you stop and look at where you’re actually at,” says Dunn.

The restaurant is a more recent venture for the couple, who wanted to share their love of food beyond the cooking school. Located in the grounds of an old asylum in the quaint town of New Norfolk, it’s currently undergoing renovations to combine both the school and dining experience into one. “We’ve already started work on the garden, which is in an old exercise yard, so it’s an acre of big, open-walled space fronting onto a 20th-century building,” he says.

For Dunn, The Agrarian Kitchen is about establishing meaningful connections with the food we eat and the land on which it’s grown. “It’s about giving guests a taste of food that is sometimes hours out of the ground. Reawakening what they think a carrot is, or what a turnip is. Or what a piece of lamb is. And to give them the best possible incarnation of that ingredient.” And for his guests, the experience is as special as visiting the island itself.

“It was such a special place. There was a raw connection with food, gardens and provenance. We just thought: we should move to Tassie.”

I have admired Rodney Dunn’s work for many years, first as the former food editor of Gourmet Traveller, then as the co-founder of the much loved Agrarian Kitchen in Tasmania. Rodney is not just a great cook he is also a fine communicator; going on a tour of The Agrarian Kitchen garden is truly inspirational, as he eloquently describes the meaningful connection with the food we eat and the land that produces it.