Sara Dining opens in Berry with two-hatted former Icebergs talent

With green ants on its mixed crudo plate and plenty of prized seafood from Australia’s best fishers, the opening of Sara Dining in Berry is the latest salvo in a golden season for regional NSW dining.

“We want to offer things people in regional restaurants don’t usually have the luxury of eating,” said Sara Dining’s culinary director Alex Prichard.

With a garden the chef hopes will eventually supply 80 per cent of the restaurant’s fruit, vegetables and herbs, Sara Dining opens on July 16. It joins the recently launched Three Blue Ducks restaurant at Burradoo Park, near Bowral, in offering a heady mix of onsite produce with Good Food Guide hatted pedigree in the kitchen.

Prichard is the former executive chef of two-hatted Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, but he isn’t a FIFO Berry transplant. Before Prichard resigned from Icebergs in March, he spent six years commuting between Shoalhaven and Bondi after making a southern seachange with his wife and business partner, Angie.

The couple has teamed with Peter and Nadia Yannopoulos, owners of Linnaeus Collection, a portfolio of holiday rentals near Sara’s home at Moraea Farm, a five-minute drive from Berry’s town centre.

“It’s an old garage with a brick facade and high ceiling,” Prichard said of the 60-seat restaurant.

He’s been playing around in the kitchen for the opening menu, which lists duck liver parfait paired with kangaroo-shaped Australian wine gummies. “Imagine a Haribo Goldbear left on the dashboard of your car on a hot day,” said the chef when describing the texture of the gummies.

It wouldn’t be a mid-2020s restaurant without a fish sandwich, and Prichard’s snack version of the form is filled with leatherjacket cheeks. The crudo plate stars wild kingfish, blue mackerel, scarlet prawns, Ulladulla tuna belly and coral trout; a $90 Kangaroo Valley-raised dairy cow rib-eye is listed among the “big plates”, next to a Moraea Farm herbed egg omelette with blue swimmer crab, and wood-fired Shoalhaven flathead with Cafe de Paris butter.

Elephant garlic from the kitchen garden flavours a duck-fat potato galette and, for dessert, pavlova with marigold cream will be a constant (although its fruit topping will change with the seasons).

Prichard is technically the head gardener, but is pointed in the right direction by generations of women. The venture is named after Sara Moraea, green-thumbed wife of 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. The chef also leans on Kirsty Hambrook from Flourish Agroecology for help. “Kirsty knows the soil. Her job is to tell me I’m an idiot, that won’t grow here.”

Meanwhile, Evan Stroeve, last seen at The Waratah in Darlinghurst, will join the restaurant as venue manager and oversees the drinks program.

Prichard believes Sara Dining is part of a new wave of experiences and talent headed south, similar to the boom in Newcastle 10 years ago. “The South Coast is going to go through the same thing,” he said.