Living the dream

DON'T ask Dan Hunter to define Australian cuisine, things may get touchy.

"Australia is a huge continent, not just a country. The food in the north is very different from what you get in the south, which is tropical," he says. "We often talk about regionality in Europe or Asia, and no one expects the food that you eat in Spain to be the same as what you get in Russia, but people forget that it is about the same distance from Melbourne to Queensland."

It sounds ironic, coming from the chef-owner of Brae, which opened last December, because he's widely revered as a definitive name in modern Australian cuisine, chiefly for his paddock-to-plate cooking ethos and his use of distinctly Australian ingredients.