MORNINGTON GLORY

MICHAEL HARDEN eats his way around the Mornington Peninsula as the region enters a delicious new chapter.

- MICHAEL HARDEN

The Mornington Peninsula has been a magnet for food lovers for a long time. Ancient shell middens around Point Nepean attest to the longstanding fondness the local First Nations people, the Boon wurrung, had for the Peninsula’s shellfish. And while it was the abundant seas that originally attracted Europeans to this stretch of land 70km south of Melbourne, it was the fertile soil and diverse microclimates that kept them there.

For a slice of land just 723km2, the Peninsula grows, produces and sells an astonishing variety of food and booze. Best known as one of Victoria’s premier wine regions, it’s also home to distilleries, cideries and breweries, and produces everything from brilliant potatoes (best sampled in the form of thrice-cooked chips at the Hawkes Farm Food Truck), cherries and truffles to olive oils, cheeses, avocados, eggs, beef and mussels. There are farm gates at every turn and the IGA supermarket in Dromana even has a salt-walled meat aging room.

It’s little wonder, then, that one of the most fertile crops on the Peninsula right now is great restaurants. All of them, from starry fine diners to casual bistros, make the most of what’s being grown and made around them – and sometimes by them. Here, we explore what the Peninsula’s best are doing with the Peninsula’s best.

Jackalope Hotel