When a Restaurant Changes a Town

Then came The Agrarian Kitchen. A project of Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet, who ran an upscale cooking school by the same name in nearby Lachlan, Agrarian was a business that combined hospitality, retail and urban renewal – it was one of the first projects in an ambitious masterplan that would redevelop the old hospital site into a thriving cultural and community hub. Located in the former women’s infirmary in the centre of the old hospital grounds, it represented hope for the future of New Norfolk. The high-ceilinged room had been painted a clean and bright white. Modernist light fixtures poked from the ceiling, while the ward’s former dining room had been transformed into a rustic kitchen with a wood-fired hearth.

From the moment it opened, Agrarian Kitchen earned glowing reviews from national publications. As a restaurant critic myself, then working for the New York Times, I visited New Norfolk in the spring of 2018 to write my own review. While I found the food and the room charming, I was unconvinced that any one restaurant might change the fate of a place. I was also disquieted by the juxtapositions at hand: the obvious economic blight on New Norfolk; the weirdness of eating a fancy meal in the ruins of a notoriously miserable hospital; the disconnect of the restaurant and the town in which it resided.

I wandered New Norfolk with an uneasy curiosity. The main street had two gun shops, a pet meat butcher, and a handful of dusty antique stores full of tattered taxidermy and broken dolls staring with hollow eyes. I was curious about the Bush Inn, a pub with a sign that claimed it was “Australia’s oldest continuously licensed hotel.” When I walked in with my brother, at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, I was reminded of an old Western movie and the moment in which the outsiders enter the saloon, the record scratches, and all heads turn. A few older men scowled at us from their perches at the bar, the pokie machines and horserace-playing televisions glowing from the back room. The barmaid got us our drinks with unabashed hostility, and told us we’d need to drink up quick; she was closing.

By the time we made it back to our hotel that night, we were giddy with anxiety over how unwelcome we obviously were in this town. We unlocked the back door to the rundown Colonial-era hotel that overlooked the river where we’d booked a room, and were greeted by a truly terrifying taxidermied bunny with one ear.

I left Tasmania feeling deeply apprehensive, and wrote a review that channelled that unease. “If Agrarian Kitchen represents the future of Tasmania — its potential tourist economy, its charm, the deliciousness of its food — it also hints at the problematic stories that the moneyed creative class tells itself about the value of its own consumption,” I wrote. “Agrarian Kitchen is a lovely restaurant. It is also a bourgeois fantasy, one that trades on some dubious strengths: the sugarcoated romantic charms of rural life; our blasé slavishness to all things artisan; and the precarious thrill of eating a $200 lunch on land that’s stained by human misery.”

Perhaps I should have known better, having already witnessed first-hand the ways in which one restaurant can alter the culture and fortunes of a community. A little over 20 years ago, my father bought a house in northern New South Wales. The tidal river that flowed past his house meandered into Brunswick Heads, a sleepy little town that had massive old pub with a front garden facing the riverfront, where old school hippy types and tradies and their kids and dogs would splash in the water throughout the summer. When I visited my dad, we’d drive to Brunswick Heads to pick up fish and chips, or hummus from the falafel shop around the corner. There was a $2 shop, a few clothing shops, and not much else. It was a sleepy country town.

Then, in 2015, came Fleet. The restaurant, from Astrid McCormack and Josh Lewis, was in a small shopfront on one of the main drags, and only sat 10 people. It quickly garnered national acclaim, and eventually international attention. It was the type of restaurant that people planned holidays around, and it brought a whole new kind of visitor to Brunswick Heads. Those people needed places to stay, places to shop, places to eat when they weren’t eating at Fleet. 

Today, Brunswick Heads is like a mini Byron Bay. The shops sell designer goods, the streets are jammed with cars every weekend and throughout the summer, there are multiple boutique accommodation options. Fleet is no longer (though McCormack and Lewis now operate other hospitality businesses in the town), but its legacy is immense. There’s argument to be made that, thanks to Brunswick Heads’ proximity to Byron – just 17 kilometres up the road – it was only a matter of time before the hippy-chic invasion arrived. But Fleet was the initial instigator, the thing that made this sleepy town into a destination that I hardly recognise, for better and for worse. 

This kind of gentrification can be a lifeline for economically depressed regions, and a huge boost for any small town. But it undeniably changes the soul of a place. In the years in which the influx of visitors was still a new phenomenon, I saw a long-time elderly resident out on the street in front of their apartment yelling at day trippers to park elsewhere. These days those daggy old apartments sell for over $1 million each – in fact, a recent cursory online search  failed to turn up any residential property in the town for under seven figures.

Because New Norfolk has changed. It is not now, nor will it ever be, a mini Byron Bay, but it does have a beautifully designed bookstore that doubles as a coffee house, which is in the process of expanding. There is a homegoods shop that sells $185 feather dusters and bespoke toilet brushes, with a sister shop around the corner specialising in expensive stationary.

The grounds of the hospital are still spooky, but new businesses are spouting up like wildflowers among the weeds. Across the street from Agrarian Kitchen, a new medical facility has opened in one of the old buildings – in another part of the grounds, a luxury accommodation project is underway. The restaurant has opened a kiosk out front that serves a far more casual offering than what you get in the dining room, and the front lawn on weekends resembles a large family picnic, with the kids of locals and visitors alike running amongst the tables.

This isn’t to say the restaurant and its owners didn’t encounter hostility and distrust from the community. But Dunn and Demanet say they feel a shift in attitude over recent months, especially since Agrarian won the coveted Gourmet Traveller restaurant of the year award last year. “It was the first time you’d look on the socials and all of the comments were positive, even from the locals,” Demanet says. “It was like, ‘oh: this is something we can be proud of.”

Sarah Clark, CEO of Tourism Tasmania, also says she sees long-time residents of New Norfolk begin to have pride in the attention that Agrarian is bringing to the town. “Ten years ago, it certainly wasn’t a place I would go on a day trip,” she says. “Now I go there with my family a couple of times a year. It has changed the way Tasmanians engage with that area.” 

Clark doesn’t think my early scepticism was unfounded, but, she says, Dunn and Demanet have done a few key things right, things that helped to both integrate them in the community. “There are elements of how they’ve engaged,” she says. “From the beginning, they were only buying from local producers. And the kiosk is key – it appeals to locals but also gives visitors another reason to visit. And it creates community, there on the lawn.” 

Demanet puts it in another, more practical light: “People that come [to Agrarian] may be dining in a fine dining restaurant, but don't forget that these people may also fill up their car with petrol.”

From a tourism perspective, Clark says, hospitality is absolutely vital to the regions, especially in a state where visitation drops sharply in colder months. “One of our key KPIs is smoothing out that seasonal imbalance,” she says. Visitors are there in warmer months for the hikes, the local beauty, but in autumn and winter, “eating and drinking and culture are our biggest strengths.”

My recent stay in New Norfolk was vastly different to my 2018 visits, but I was heartened to still find the whole experience pretty weird. I browsed at the fancy homegoods and stationery shops, lusted after antiques in town, bought embroidery needles at a new craft store that was a mix of old and new: daggy and earnest enough to feel like country Australia, but specialised enough that it likely wouldn’t survive without the visitors attracted by the bougier things in town. 

The motel where I stayed looked like a primary school art project – as if the owners took the contents of four large op-shops, colour-coordinated the inventory, and then layered everything atop an already existing hotel, the outside a 3D collage of weirdness. I went back to the pub, the Bush Inn, which has been redone in recent years. I was met with a warm welcome, a much better beer selection, and an odd entrance/secondary bar area full of unsettling taxidermy. The crowd on a Friday night was large and friendly, but this is no gastropub or trendy imitation of Fitzroy – you’re still going to be greeted by a wonky stuffed cat posed as if it might claw your eyes out.

And lunch at Agrarian was still wonderful, and still a little weird, but the sense of community was palpable. A fantastic tostada dish was delivered along with an explanation that the green corn used in for the tortilla was grown by “Speedway Mick,” referencing his plot of land adjacent to the nearby AutoKlene Speedway – its programming is a fixture of the New Norfolk calendar from November to April. Beers from Welcome Swallow brewery are highlighted, along with prideful explanations about the areas hops-growing history and prowess. Derwent Valley wines are described not just with tasting notes, but also with affectionate stories about the makers.

In a corner park on the main street, a not-for-profit organisation set up a soup-kitchen type of situation, and plenty of residents of the town – certainly more than were at the Agrarian kiosk – were there to partake of a free meal. Agrarian Kitchen has not magically fixed all of New Norfolk’s problems, and it will take more than just one restaurant to turn the tide of this town’s fortunes. But my 2018 assumption that consumption as a force for renewal is an oblivious fantasy was cynical at best. With the right intentions, concrete actions, and real commitment to the community in which you do business, even a fancy restaurant can be powerful and transformative.