Escape to the Southern Highlands for a weekend of history, food and wine! We stay at the beautifully restored Berida Hotel in Bowral and enjoy delicious food in Bowral. We also visit the newest food, wine and art festival, the Horizontal Festival. A perfect country getaway.
It's Friday night when Sophia and I arrive in the Southern Highlands, ready for the inaugural Horizontal Festival on the October long weekend. We check into the Berida Hotel, a stunning historic hotel in Bowral just set off the main road.
This 100 year old building has 46 guest rooms and has a storied past. It was originally built in 1925 as a country manor for Dr Jessie Strahorn Aspinall, Australia's first female junior resident medical officer at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and her husband Ambrose William Freeman. Upon his passing, Dr Aspinall donated Berida and its 3 acres to the Australian Red Cross in 1941. Since then it has had many incarnations from a school to a health farm under chef Margaret Fulton before becoming Berida Manor hotel. In 2016 it was purchased by local hotelier family, the Duffys.
The current design of the interior takes the country manor theme and runs with it. You almost expect a hound in a jacket to come traipsing through the hotel's reception area.
There are 8 room types and our room #25 is a lovely king deluxe room.It is located on the ground floor with garden beds outside and is set up with twin beds. Next to the bed there is a comfortable lounge and coffee table. There's a mini bar as well as a fridge and tea and coffee making supplies. The room is warm and controlled with adjustable central heating which is much needed during the cold nights in the Southern Highlands.
The bathroom is designed in black and white colour scheme with aromatic Lue toiletries. Pictures of birds and butterflies line the duck egg blue walls.
The hotel is also home to the French inspired Bistro Sociale. Located opposite the reception area it's buzzing tonight but since we don't have a booking we head out to a Bowral institution for a succulent Chinese meal.
Shanghai Chinese Restaurant is located on Bong Bong Street, the main street of Bowral. It has been open for 40 years and when we walk in it is very busy. Almost every table is taken and every free table has a reserved sign. Supermarket magazines sit on a table for the manu people collecting takeaway.
They manage to squeeze us in after a short wait which we spend admiring the colourful pressed tin ceiling. The whole restaurant looks like a Wes Anderson set and we are also the only Chinese customers in the restaurant.
We have a hankering for Chinese Australians classics tonight starting with prawn toast which comes as 6 large halves of white bread spread thinly with minced prawn with sweet and sour sauce on the side. I haven't seen servings this large in a long time. The ham and chicken roll, a favourite from my childhood is tasty and filled with ham and chicken pieces.
The sweet and sour pork is a classic dish that does not disappoint with plenty of battered pork with capsicum and onion in a tasty sweet and sour sauce. The Mongolian lamb comes out sizzling on a cast iron plate and it is truly like stepping back into your childhood. The lamb is tender and the sauce is full of flavour. The chicken with chow mein is served with shredded chicken which I've never tried before and that does need a bit more seasoning.
The servings here are enormous, easily double what you would get in Sydney and it is hard to put a dent into them. We end up with 4 takeaway boxes of food and no room at all for a deep fried ice cream.
Breakfast the next morning is downstairs at Bistro Sociale where there's a good Continental selection to choose from as well as hot scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon and sausages. Omelettes and pancakes can be ordered with the waitstaff and I order myself an egg white omelette with cheese, chilli and ham which is excellent. I sip some juice with my omelette.
The main reason for our visit to the Southern Highlands is to attend the inaugural Horizontal Festival at Centennial Vineyards. The festival encompasses food, wine and art and is the creation of Amanda Fry, who runs the popular Experience Nature events.
There are four sessions over the two days with a day and evening session on each day and each session is identical. There are two types of tickets: a general admission ticket for $59 that gives you access to plenty of wine tastings and food sampling or the Platinum VIP ticket for $149 that gives you that plus access to the Porsche sponsored Platinum tent where guests receive a welcome cocktail and can do a wine tasting and help themselves to the cheese and fruit grazing platter.
When we first enter, we're given a stemless glass for our wine tastings. At the entrance a pianist is playing and each side of the tents has a range of wine and food tastings. Each vendor from across NSW is happy to give samples and explain their products. We try everything from Bowral honey to Cupitt's Winery, Mama Kim's kimchi, La Bastide charcuterie and White Feather relishes. Almost all of the stalls have samples to try and don't pressure to buy.
One of our favourite stands is John Harley seafoods who are selling three types of oysters with a choice of 4 types of oyster dressings: lemon juice and 3 delicious Tasteology dressings. I particularly love the ginger and lime dressing on my oyster. We also try their bug meat and lettuce sliders that are delicious and fantastic value for $15 for two.
Afterwards we head for the cool respite of the masterclass tent. All of the Masterclass sessions include pours of complimentary wine designed to go with the food that we will be tasting. Chef Simon Evans of Bangalay Villas is demonstrating how to make slow-cooked kangaroo tail with mushrooms, pickled muntries and yarrow using native paperbark.
He explains about using different paper barks like lemon myrtle to add flavour. If you have a paperback tree at home or access to one, you can peel the top layer of paperbark from it - just be aware of ants. He recommends submerging the bark in water to let it soak.
He also explains a chef or restaurant trick for any meat is to wet or dry brine the meat in a 5% salt solution or dry brine with a coating of salt for at least 1 hour to tenderise the meat. Kangaroo is quite a different meat to cook and some people make the mistake of treating kangaroo like a steak and cook it with high heat. Instead use low heat because the meat is so low in fat. At the retreat's restaurant he sous vides the kangaroo at 50C/122F and finishes it off with a light sear at the end.
The staff bring around sampler plates of the kangaroo with parsley cake and muntries - these indigenous berries have a short season and are paired with the kangaroo in the sam way that duck is paired with cherries. It's absolutely delicious and the tender kangaroo is cooked rare in the centre.
After this MasterChef alum Mindy Woods takes to the stage. She is a proud Bundjalung woman from the North East coast of NSW. She explains how indigneous Australian culture is the oldest food culture in the world at 36,000 years old with 6,500 native ingredients.
Today she is making a pipi curry made with Johnny cakes, a soft bread traditionally made with bunya nut flour. Mindy explains how her nan had 11 children but raised 17 in North Lismore in NSW. She learned at a young age to use native ingredients like Karkalla or pig face to soothe sun burn, midge bites and ease tummy aches. Ingredients like lemon myrtle are high in calcium and older women brew this in tea. She encourages the use of native lemongrass and ginger over the use of imported versions and gives tips on adding native ingredients eg macadamia nuts in butter chicken instead of cream. She also suggests using saltbush or karkalla instead of salt to season ingredients as these give food a complexity that salt doesn't.
She finishes off the curries with an oil infusion and we are served the pipi curry with Johnny cakes made with wattleseed, yogurt and self raising flour. Traditionally these cakes would be made with saltbush ash as a rising agent. "I'm giving away all my secrets!" she says and explains that these cakes are made with a 2:1 ratio with 2 flour 1 yogurt with salt or saltbush.
The next session features Chef Mark Best from the Netflix series The Final Table and the restaurant Infinity by Mark Best. He and Eilish Mahoney stand in front of a range of shimeji and lion's mane mushrooms, the latter that he calls "vegetarian's sweetbread". These are grown by a 22 year old Joel, a mushroom grower from Misty Valley gourmet mushrooms. He also uses milk and cream from The Little Big Dairy Co. He makes creme fraiche that he cultures for 8 days and serves this with samples of Caneles with Malfoys gold honey that are divine. He then serves up dark bread with cultured butter that are so good that Sophia takes second serves of this.
He encourages people to buy local not just to support local businesses but also to get a longer shelf life for produce. He explains that with great produce the less you have to do with it so it makes sense for restaurant economics and labour hours. The lamb that he uses is a haired sheep variety of lamb that has no lanolin smell and is polyestrous which means that it is self replacing often with twins and triplets. "They'll also eat fence posts and drink mud," he says.
On the farm they use radish as tillage to break up the soil and the sheep graze on the tops of the daikon. His next sample references the symbiosis between livestock and produce as he makes a lamb lup cheong style sausage that is sweet, smoky and spicy and he pairs this with daikon kimchi.
He ends off his Masterclass with his trademark dry and acerbic humour explaining that while he doesn't have a book to flog, people can come up get a blessing or touch his head. And that's a cue for a man to run up from the back of the room to rub his head (thankfully he knows Mark).
We head to the Platinum tent to collect our $50 platinum cards and for a welcome cocktail. The cocktails range from a Pink Lotus Spritz, Negroni highball, Crispy yuzu and Garden and Tonic. We take a perch on the fur lined stools with our cocktails before going to some of the stands to try some of the food. The spinach and cheese gozleme is very tasty and we also really enjoy the porchetta roll with apple relish and a crispy edged porchetta slice on a soft bun.
We also head to the Trolley'd bar where the bartender mixes up cocktails in a retro plane setting while wearing a pilot's uniform. Then it's time to bid the festival goodbye.
The next day we head to check out the charms of historica town Berrima and stop in for a cake at Baked in Berrima before heading to the Bendooley Book Barn, a very popular restaurant and bookstore. It's extremely busy and bookings are definitely necessary for weekends although we managed to get a booking a couple of days before.
All of the mains have recommended wine matches and we decide to share one of their specialties, the linguine with picked Australian blue swimmer crab, chilli, garlic, lemon & gremolata which is very tasty. We have this with the roasted chat potato salad, confit garlic, baby spinach, aioli, crispy bacon & shaved Grana Padano. Both are delicious and the perfect ending to our Southern Highlands weekend.
So tell me Dear Reader, what do9 you love the most: food, wine or art?
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