A Market Garden Is at the Heart of Wayfinder’s Soon-To-Open Margaret River Restaurant and Cellar Door

Wayfinder’s new restaurant and cellar door in Wilyabrup are deeply rooted in modernity. When the vineyard opens to the public later this year, it’ll have extensive solar panelling to support a fully off-grid site; an electric kitchen; and a state-of-the-art, gravity-led winery, where vertical tanks are built into the ground so grapes, juice and wine flow downwards, reducing the need for pumping. Beyond that, there are 37 hectares of certified organic vines, a 50-seat restaurant run by one of WA’s most celebrated chefs, and a regenerative farm complete with ducks, sheep, an orchard and bees.

But grandeur, architecture, and ambition aside, the heart of the Wayfinder offering is its market garden.

“It’s purpose-built to feed the two venues,” says head market gardener Amy Dyson, referring to both chef Brendan Pratt’s new Margaret River restaurant and Wayfinder’s existing Dunsborough cellar door, which has pulled from the garden for the past two years.

At its centre is a greenhouse nursery, where most crops begin. For Dyson, that level of involvement from seed to harvest is key. “We grow almost everything from seed,” she says. “It means we can be really intentional about what we plant and how we grow it.”

That control allows the team to focus on “being really particular and growing both beautiful and difficult crops,” Dyson says.

At the restaurant, executive chef Brendan Pratt’s kitchen offering will be shaped by the garden, the farm and the wine. Pratt, whose career includes Vasse Felix and The Fat Duck, says Wayfinder marks both a return to the south-west and to work that feels purposeful and connected. “There was always a desire to find something meaningful again,” he says.

Dishes, which will range from casual lawn snacks to à la carte dining and a tasting menu, will rely on the venue’s connection to community and place. “There’s produce grown 150 metres away from the kitchen, and you’re getting access to it at its best possible point,” Pratt says.

With 12 months of forward planning and a focus on minimising waste, there will also be plenty of preserving, pickling and fermenting. The team is planning guided garden tours as well.

All these interconnected efforts combine to create a cellar door and restaurant that may look sleek, but beneath the scale and polish of the project is a clear environment-first approach and a deep respect for the land.

Wayfinder’s cellar door will open on August 3, and the restaurant will open in September at 381 Brockman Road, Cowaramup.

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