Rodney Dunn and Séverine Demanet, founders of the eponymous schoolhouse turned farm and the cooking school less than 10 minutes away, opened the Agrarian Kitchen Eatery in 2015 to share their produce and cooking with a wider audience. The light-flooded space, with original stamped tin reflecting off the high ceiling, is so beautiful you’d never guess it was once a mental asylum. The only mental hardship now is deciding what to order for lunch, whether it’s the wood-roasted southern lamb or the hot smoked bay trout. Still can’t decide? For $70 per person, the kitchen will feed you the best dishes of the day. If you’re road tripping up the Derwent River, at least stop in for a biscuit or a lamington with Agrarian Kitchen jam.
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The Agrarian Kitchen
“Rodney and Severine have been operating this cooking school with a fully operational and very productive garden in the Derwent for eight years,” says Hobart-based chef David Moyle. “Over that time it has become widely recognized whilst the garden has developed.”
Work for it: The Agrarian Kitchen
Located in a former schoolhouse, this culinary retreat teaches everything from whole-hog butchering to vintage baking. The most popular class? The Agrarian Experience, which starts with a foraging excursion and finishes with a hands-on cooking class where students make dishes such as nettle-and-asparagus gnocchi from scratch.
Forage and dine in The Agrarian Kitchen
A Tasmanian chef leads guests from garden to kitchen at the incredible The Agrarian Kitchen. The sustainable farm-based cooking school is situated in a 19th century schoolhouse at Lachlan, 45 minutes from Hobart in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley. Chef and owner Rodney Dunn and his wife Séverine moved from Sydney to Tasmania in 2007 to transform a schoolhouse into Tasmania’s first hands-on, farm-based cooking school. You basically book in, turn up, the browse the gardens for ingredients. The chef then takes you into the gorgeous kitchen, where you learn what to do with the produce. Set on five acres, The Agrarian Kitchen incorporates an extensive vegetable garden, orchard, berry patch and herb garden, all grown using organic principles. There are Wessex saddleback pigs, Barnevelder chickens, two British Alpine goats and a flock of geese. This is one of my favourite things to do in Tasmania.
