Red Feather Inn & Cooking School

At the Red Feather Inn, 15 minutes’ drive from Launceston, you can enjoy fine food and wine or test your cooking skills. Built by convicts in the mid-nineteenth century, the Inn’s sandstone colonial buildings and lush gardens have been maintained with Victorian elegance and tidiness.

The restaurant is open on Friday and Saturday evenings by reservation. For guests staying at the inn, a shared menu is served on weekday evenings. The cuisine is slow, country-style cooking with a hint of Provence. The menu changes regularly to feature ingredients grown on the estate.

Entrees include pan-fried quail with roasted onion and sage; and herbed salmon with puy lentils. Mains stay in hearty territory with slow-roasted pork belly and burnt cabbage mash; and Tasmanian lamb rump with potato gratin and green beans.

The wine list features plenty of Tasmanian cool climate wines chosen to match the food. At the on-site cooking school, you can learn how to cure and smoke your own bacon, make pasta from scratch, or master “Wood-Fired Winter Warmers”, the art of braising and slow-cooking winter favourites in a wood-fired oven.

Red Feather Inn also offers French provincial style accommodation, and regularly holds weddings and other private events.