Having kitted out some of the smartest restaurants in town (think Etsu and Mamasan), Jess Winters had plenty of ideas for what she wanted in her first cafe, so her partner Peter Tutton learned new skills to complete the vision, the pair harnessing some great talent to be part of their team. So, Double Barrel...

They say that location is everything, but for cafés, that doesn’t always mean being in the main street. Sometimes, being the only café in a neighbourhood can be a winning formula, especially when the venue provides great service to the community. When Dylan and Kira Rackley took over the Lakeview General Store just over four...

It was to be a ‘wild food’ garden feast – five courses made from local and hyper-local produce held in the gardens of the magnificent Mavis’s Kitchen, Uki. As the sun descended on the afternoon, seventy people gathered to have a dinner with friends and strangers at two long linen-clad tables strewn with magnolia branches,...

When Titans Greg Bird, Nate Myles, Sel Berdie and Mat Rogers decided to open a restaurant with their friends, we were interested to check out the food of superheroes! Hype aside, BSKT is a simple concept: a dual function holistic café integrated with a yoga/pilates centre upstairs; a venue flooded with sunlight holding the best...

It’s rare for me to be completely ecstatic about a dining experience. Despite extensive research about where we’ll dine, more often I’m quietly enthralled with some parts of the experience or people we’ve met, pleased with the overall meal, sometimes hopeful and occasionally disappointed. But our trip to Mavis’s Kitchen is stellar. It’s a rare...

Walk up from the beach at Currumbin, and you can talk surf with Johnny Gillett, who owns The Salt Mill with his wife Sarah. Perfect as their first café, it’s a little ‘cute as a button’ nook put together using the couple’s combined skills. Rough-hewn bench seats, fruit cartons and a wine barrel tell us...

‘Paleo Pinup.’ Peter Dufty would be really uncomfortable with that tag, but there’s an element of truth in it. From Versace to raw (and we’re not talking clothing), Pete’s one of Gold Coast food’s quiet achievers – a classically trained ‘master chef’ who has jumped the culinary fence from haute cuisine to healthy eating, leaving...