Wizard of Oz
THE MOST ENTHRALLING part of Brae: Recipes and Stories From the
Restaurant, Australian chef Dan Hunter’s handsome book of memoir and recipes, is the landscape. Just 81 miles southwest of Melbourne, in the Otway hinterland in Australia, Hunter’s restaurant Brae shares its environment with immense waves that land on the nearby coastline, corpulent parakeets in the trees, impenetrable forest and gushing waterfalls.
The book juxtaposes Hunter’s unpretentious prose with Colin Page’s photographs of rugged nature. Under the heading “Road to Brae,” the chef tells the story of his coming of age, from his pot-smoking days as a teen rebel to running the “pass” at Spain’s revered Mugaritz restaurant. He stumbled upon Brae (originally called Sunnybrae), an old redbrick cottage on 30 acres of land, in 2013; there, he created the restaurant that subsequently sealed his reputation as a culinary luminary with an international following.
This year, Brae is 44th on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. And you can see why just by leafing through Hunter’s book. The chef’s vignettes about his kitchen and garden, an oasis of vegetables, fruit trees, olive groves and chickens, depict a bucolic idyll. The final half of the book, a compendium of Hunter’s recipes, is a feast of food photography. From silken asparagus and prawns garnished with baby leek flowers to the carefully composed broad bean, green almond and strawberry with yogurt whey ( above), we get to peer at painterly dishes as absorbing as his story. —