What ninety percent local actually means

Ninety percent of what we serve travels under two hundred kilometres. The number sounds like marketing until you ask what the remaining ten percent is: coffee, chocolate, some spices, and the imported wines guests specifically request.

Lamb comes from saltbush country near Esperance, marron from licensed dams in the south west, dairy from a single Jersey herd near Brunswick, and the vegetables from growers who text us photos of the morning's pull.

The discipline has a cost guests feel without knowing it: blackout dates. When a product isn't at its best we simply don't serve it, which is why the menu occasionally loses a dish you came for.

Direct contracts mean no wholesaler buffer, which cuts both ways. We get produce at a freshness wholesale can't match, and we also get the phone call when the season fails. Both are preferable to not knowing.

Jonas Reid coordinates most of the south-west growers and has veto power over our menu in a way no consultant ever would. When he says the truffles are ready, the risotto changes that week.

Kitchen waste stays under four percent of food purchases, weighed monthly across every bin stream and audited externally. The number prints in the staff room because chefs behave differently when the result is public.

Shellfish shells go back to oyster leases as spat substrate, vegetable trim goes to the rooftop garden's compost, and cooking oil leaves as biodiesel. The remaining few percent is honest waste: bones too small to render, the occasional plate that loses a fight.