
Photo: Courtesy of Barragunda Dining / Kristoffer Paulsen
Coming Soon
Simone Watts Spent Four Years Building Her Dream Restaurant – It Finally Opens This Month
The former Coda head chef has been quietly building Barragunda Dining on a regenerative farm near the cliffs of Cape Schanck.

Words by Daniela Frangos·Wednesday 5 February 2025
After a decade cooking in busy city restaurants, Simone Watts realised how disconnected she was from the produce she was serving. “I was getting very detached from cooking and getting upset seeing boxes of produce arrive and having no idea where they came from,” she tells Broadsheet. “I was going away on weekends to get out into nature … and I woke up one day, thinking, ‘Why am I not flipping this and going into the city once in a while and living where I want to live?’”
So in 2016, she left her head chef role at Coda and got as far from city life as she could – to a 500-year-old mango farm on a volcanic island in Sumatra. After grounding herself there, she came home to work at Transition Farm on the Mornington Peninsula. “That was where it all changed for me,” she says. It lit a fire in her and started an unwavering commitment to regenerative farming, crop diversity and prioritising nutrient-dense produce over stuff with high yield or longer shelf life.
After a stint at a native fruit farm in Far North Queensland, then a role as executive chef at the Daintree Ecolodge, she returned to the peninsula to begin work on the biggest project of her career: an ambitious 40-person restaurant, regenerative farm and market garden on the 1000-acre Barragunda Estate, on the southernmost tip of the peninsula, stretching to the cliffs of Cape Schanck and Bushrangers Bay. More than four years in the making, it finally opens this month.
Broadsheet arrives along a winding gravel road, past tea trees, she-oaks and moonah before reaching the secluded restaurant – a glass pavilion extending out from an old farm shed that’s been reimagined by David Dubois Architecture (Portsea Hotel).

“It still doesn't feel real. If you’d seen what this shed looked like before … it was a tiny, poky kitchenette farmers used to make their tea and coffee in,” Watts says.
Now the glasshouse dining room looks out to the abundant market garden, where farmer Karl Breese tends to rows of artichokes, carrots, spring onions, celeriac, radishes, turnips, saltbush and more. Both he and Watts’s partner Samuel Humphreys – who has a native bush nursery on the property – are part of the Barragunda Collective, a cooperative of farmers and chefs who share the land, equipment and kitchen here. There’s also florist Amy Mosley, who has a flower farm on-site; kitchen gardener Robyn Fox, who has a small-scale seedling nursery; cheesemaker Judy Gifford, who’ll supply the cheese for the restaurant; and patissier Laura Skvor, who’ll provide the desserts.
Further along the property is Watts’s own thriving patch of the farm, where she’s been growing native murnong (yam daisy), lemongrass, heirloom chillies, four kinds of heirloom tomatoes (Breese is growing another 10 varieties), chickpeas (to be dried and turned into miso), soybeans (which will become soy sauce) and a whole lot more. “I remember years ago [at restaurants] sitting back and going, ‘okay, what’s in season now?’ Now I’m going out into the high tunnel and going ‘oh wow, the oxheart tomatoes are looking spectacular this week’. Or, ‘the coast wirilda is flowering at the same time as the peaches, those two flavours are going to love each other’.

“I think the diversity of this property is key and maybe what makes it different to other farms,” says Watts, who lives on the estate. “At all times, the question is, ‘What is going to be best for the environment?’ and that always goes back to diversity.”
The set menu will celebrate the estate’s produce and evolve with the farm’s natural cycles. Vegetable-forward dishes will be complemented by Estate-reared hogget and Black Angus beef, and sustainable seafood from the peninsula’s Wild Life Fisheries. The estate’s orchards of apples, pears, quinces, peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots and figs will inform the desserts and bar menu. Eventually, the team will grow its own rye, too.
The estate is owned by the Morris family, who were formerly behind Daintree Ecolodge, where Watts met Hayley Morris, executive director of the Morris Family Foundation. Profits from the restaurant will go to the foundation to support systemic change in Australia’s food systems.

In the coming weeks, the food menu and restaurant design will take centrestage, but Watts is clear on the story she wants to share at Barragunda. “It’s about giving faces to farmers, and that’s not just the farmers here in the collective, but also on the rest of the peninsula: showcasing what they’re doing, how hard they’re working,” she says. “But also telling the story of this place and how beautiful it is. And creating a place people can be proud of … specifically our local community.”
Barragunda Dining is expected to open at 113 Cape Schanck Road, Cape Schanck on Friday February 21. Bookings are open now.

About the author
Daniela Frangos is Broadsheet Adelaide's editor-at-large and a freelance food, drinks and culture writer.