A standout dining experience that feels like a dinner party at a friend’s place, Tedesca Osteria is all about wood-fired cooking and connection to place in both food and wine.
Chef Brigitte Hafner and her wine-guy business partner James Broadway first appeared on food and drink lovers’ radars with their pioneering wine bar-bottleshop hybrid Gertrude Street Enoteca in Melbourne. A move to a beautiful property at Red Hill on the Mornington Peninsula a couple of years ago to open Tedesca Osteria saw Brigitte’s already intense focus on the local and the seasonal become even sharper. She now has the space to grow her own produce (biodynamically) and can liaise directly with the best growers and producers in the region. In James’s wide-ranging wine cellar, meanwhile, great local stuff rubs shoulders with acclaimed small Australian and international producers. Add a beautifully renovated 1940s timber cottage with an impressive wood-fired kitchen hearth and timber kitchen bench right in the dining room, and Tedesca Osteria becomes a singular, locally focused dining experience that’s at once refined and rustic, elegant and easy-going. There’s a daily-changing, five-course menu of deceptively simple, Euro-influenced food, a single seating at lunch so you never feel like the clock is ticking, and an approach to service that feels less restaurant and more friend’s dinner party. It all combines to make this one of the most acclaimed and enjoyable places to eat in Australia.
From the moment you arrive at this Red Hill property and make your way through landscaped gardens to the monumental hand-carved timber door to Tedesca Osteria, there’s an immediate sense you’re in for something special. The feeling only amps up inside. You’ll see Brigitte working down one end of the timber-floored room at the kitchen bench in front of the bespoke brick hearth, crowned with a massive stone bull’s head that once adorned a food market in France. She might be rolling out pasta (the menu’s basic form is antipasto, pasta, fish and meat, dessert) or tending the duck or lamb cooking over coals. A long table running down the centre of the room is strewn with vases of flowers and foliage from the garden, and the place is flooded with light from a wall of windows that frames the view of the surrounding farmland. Once the food and wine begin to roll out over the next three or four hours, chances are you’ll find it difficult to imagine ever wanting to leave.
The ultimate Tedesca Osteria experience involves staying at the beautiful Graceburn accommodation right next door to the restaurant. It has a couple of choices: the main double-storey house that sleeps eight people or the smaller Glasshouse that sleeps two. The accommodation includes breakfast the next morning in the house’s large, smartly appointed kitchen.
