Mara Ellison
Executive Chef
Fifteen years across Sydney and Copenhagen kitchens before coming home to Perth. Writes the menu around the growers' calls.
"A perfect plate lets the ingredient stay the loudest voice."
About Coastal Plateau
The restaurant that grew up with Crown Perth
Coastal Plateau Hospitality Group runs the Epicurean dining room and the private salon experiences at Crown Perth. What began as a forty-seat local restaurant is now one of Western Australia's most decorated dining destinations, still buying from the same families who supplied us on day one.
Farm to table, for real
Ninety percent of the plate travels under two hundred kilometres
Our purchasing charter reads like a farming cooperative's. Lamb from saltbush country near Esperance, marron from licensed dams in the south west, citrus and stone fruit out of the Swan Valley, dairy from a single Jersey herd near Brunswick.
- Direct contracts with twenty six growers and producers, no wholesale intermediaries.
- Seasonal blackout dates when an ingredient is not at its best, no matter how popular the dish.
- Whole carcass butchery and a preservation program that carries summer produce into winter.
0
Partner farms
0
% local sourcing
0
Seasonal menus yearly
Hands that make the room
The artisans behind every plate and chair
The plates your food arrives on are thrown by a ceramics studio in Fremantle. The linen is woven in Victoria. Even the steak knives come from a Perth knifemaker who visits the kitchen quarterly to sharpen the set himself.
Why it matters
Guests notice weight and texture before they taste anything. Handmade service ware carries the same argument as the food: someone cared about this.
Fremantle Clay Studio
Stoneware service plates and sharing bowls
Argent Forge, Perth
Hand-forged steak and cheese knives
Bendigo Linen Mill
Table linen and kitchen aprons
The brigade
The people your evening depends on
Twenty two chefs, four sommeliers, two floor managers and a concierge desk. Here are the three who set the tone.
Amelia Court
Head Sommelier
Built the six hundred label cellar from a single fridge. Spends every vintage week somewhere between Margaret River and the Great Southern.
"A wine list should read like a map of where we've been."
Ines Moreau
Head Pastry Chef
Trained in Lyon, settled in Burswood. Runs the dessert flight at the pastry counter and the dairy-free program nobody notices is dairy-free.
"Dessert is the last thing a guest remembers. It has to land."
Filmed during a Thursday service, unedited pass footage
Behind the pass
Three hundred covers, one choreography
Service at Epicurean looks calm because the chaos is scheduled. Prep starts at seven, the pass runs hot from six, and the last sauce is mounted at half past ten.
07:00
Deliveries logged and checked
16:30
Team briefing and menu changes
18:00
First seating, pass goes live
22:30
Last plate leaves the kitchen
Then and now
Old family recipes, new voices
The lamb pie on the bar menu descends from chef Ellison's grandmother's recipe box. The marron course rewrites a dish her father served at a Fremantle trattoria in 1987. Tradition is an ingredient here, not a museum piece.
"I keep the handwritten cards in my office. When we change a dish, I write the new version on the back of the old one. The pile is getting thick."
Mara Ellison, on her grandmother's recipe box
1987 · the trattoria version
Today · the Epicurean version
What changed
The 1987 dish poached the marron in court-bouillon and plated it with cream. Today it finishes over charcoal, the shells become the butter, and the cream moved into a fermented coastal green oil.
Where a plate's waste goes
Shellfish shells
Dried, ground, returned to oyster leases as spat substrate
Vegetable trim
Composted through the Crown rooftop garden program
Cooking oil
Collected for biodiesel conversion monthly
Corks
Sent to the national cork recycling program
Zero waste, measured
Under four percent, and falling
Most kitchens talk about sustainability in adjectives. We publish ours in kilograms: a monthly weigh-in across every bin stream, audited by an external consultant, printed in the staff room and shared with our growers.
Since 2021 the program has kept kitchen waste below four percent of total food purchases. The remaining few points are the honest part of the report: bones too small to render, the occasional broken plate, and coffee grounds that still find a second life in the rooftop garden.
Read the full report
Art on the walls
A dining room that doubles as a gallery
Three times a year the walls change over. We hang Western Australian artists exclusively, every work is for sale, and the opening nights have become their own small events in the Perth calendar.
Current hang · Salt and Light
Coastal photography from Ningaloo to Esperance, curated by gallery director Sonia Reyes. Through the end of the season.
Meet the curator
Sonia walks the room on Friday evenings and loves talking guests through the work over a glass of something cold.
In print
What they've written about us
Clippings our mothers keep, and a few we earned the hard way.
National dining review
"The clearest argument for eating in Perth right now."
March 2025
Gourmet Traveller
"Marron, chardonnay and river light. Order the full flight."
WA dining guide, 2025
Broadsheet Perth
"The rare casino restaurant you'd visit without a chips budget."
Editor's pick, January
Questions
About us, answered
More questions live on the FAQ page, and the concierge answers the rest in person.
Coastal Plateau Hospitality Group Pty Ltd, a Perth-based
company founded by Nathan Crossfield in 2004. The group
operates the Epicurean restaurant and salon experiences
at Crown Perth under a long-term residency agreement.
We are an independent restaurant group in residence at
Crown Perth. That means our own chefs, our own suppliers
and our own wine cellar, inside the resort's dining
precinct.
The chef's table sits inside the kitchen itself, and
pass tours run for tasting menu guests on request. Book
the
chef's table experience
for the closest seat in the house.
Our event team travels for select off-site functions
across the Perth metro area. Off-site catering needs a
minimum of twenty guests and six weeks of lead time.