VENUE PROFILE: WATERVALE HOTEL

From (our) farm to (our) table

Nicola Palmer and Warrick Duthy are espousing a more ethically sustainable way of feeding people between Penobscot Farm and Watervale Hotel – and gaining a lot of fans in the process.

FATE HAS played a huge part in the career trajectory of Nicola Palmer and her husband Warrick Duthy in the last few years. In 2018 they purchased the Penobscot Farm and it’s nine acres in South Australia’s Clare Valley as a homestead. When checking out the Watervale Hotel for dinner one night – their new local – they got chatting to the long-term owner who suggested they should have bought the pub instead. Two days later, they were exchanging contracts for the hotel. Palmer had helmed her family business of Skillogalee Restaurant as head chef, while Duthy is a part owner and director of Kilikanoon Wines, so taking on the pub played to their strengths.

Nicola Palmer

Duthy suggested they start growing produce on Penobscot Farm for the hotel. A chance conversation with their yoga teacher led them to hiring her husband, a permaculture expert, who would advise them on how to set up the farm to grow food sustainably and biodynamically.

“My husband Warrick loves to talk and see what comes out of those seeds of conversation, and it’s amazing what does sometimes,” states Palmer.

Since those chance conversations four years ago, the farm now produces anywhere between 500-800kg of produce for the pub each week. The pub, in turn, attracts ‘locals’ from up to two hours away, while becoming a Clare Valley must-visit destination for tourists from all over the country. It’s only been operating under the Palmer-Duthy duo for two years but it already has won over 20 awards from a host of associations, as it’s recognised for its overwhelmingly accomplished menu and its sustainability practices.

Abundance and variety

Penobscot Farm has undergone a huge transformation in the last few years with the help of permaculture expert Jared Murray. The farm grows vegetables, fruits and nuts. Still in its infancy, the farm has two major garden beds for vegetables, with a third on the way. Over 250 fruit, nut and berry trees have been planted that are just starting to bear fruit. With minimal waste being a major principle of the hotel, the issues that Palmer and her kitchen team have to contend with constantly is an abundance of produce, and then a lack of variety of produce at any one time.

“At the moment we’ve got lots of fennel and lots of leaves. So when we harvest we’ve got hundreds of kilos of one product and the challenge is not just how do we use it on the menu in a dish, it’s how do we get it into a jar, how do we ferment it, how do we dry it, how do we pickle it, how do we poach it, how can we make it usable at other times of the year?” Storing produce and extending its lifespan throughout the year is a consideration that Palmer has to contend with constantly, so that she’s minimising the need to purchase produce from outside the farm.

Penobscot Farm yields 600-800kg of produce a week

“Everything we do is really about how can we use this product now, but also have it in the future. Because you know when all we’re getting is eggplant and more eggplant, the jarred, fermented or pickled product plays a big role in the menu at harder times of the year.”

For Palmer, it’s a way of getting back to how the Silent Generation cooked and ate – ensuring that no food went to waste. It’s also an approach that she wishes more chefs would implement in their kitchens.

“It’s certainly a different way of thinking to what chefs are trained in, where they might be trained seasonally but they still ring up a supplier and say I’ll have three kilos this week and three kilos next week until I choose not have that on the menu anymore.

“We might have a cauliflower dish on, and I think we’re going to have cauliflowers for the next eight weeks but then we get some really hot weather and they all go to flower and need to be harvested this week. So you may not have a dish on for as long as you think you’re going to just through weather. It’s challenging, but very exciting.”

Skills and menus

Taking a no-waste approach seriously means implementing a lot of different cooking techniques and skills within the kitchen. Besides pickling, jarring and fermenting, Palmer and her team also create things like tomato powders, and make all their own dairy products from cheese to crème fraiche to ice cream.

In terms of animal protein, Palmer orders in whole cows, pigs and lambs from neighbouring farms, and thus the team have had to learn butchery and how to use every part of the animal. This has led to making such varied products as lamb bacon, lamb liver parfait, pork prosciutto and pig’s head terrine.

Getting back to all of these skills that have either become specialised or phased out equipment has been another big focus forPalmer, who wanted to encourage learning within the Watervale Hotel team, even if it is more labour intensive.

“We’ve created a place of learning, that’s always been quite important in our design of the kitchen and the hotel. It is hard though. It’s harder to get people to scrape the plates into four different containers and teach young chefs to look at what they’re putting into compost buckets.

“But we’ve also been able to develop a great kitchen of learning. I want my young chefs to learn how to make yoghurt, churn butter and make crème fraiche, and butcher animals and all of those things. I’m a strong believer that we should be making everything from scratch, by hand and in-house, and relearning those skills from what we’ve all forgotten.”

This level of ambition requires a fair amount of staff, particularly as the hotel is open seven days a week. Watervale Hotel employs 8-10chefs and a couple more kitchen hands.

The beer garden at Watervale Hotel

“It’s taken a lot more hands than we expected to process 500-800kg of product a week, plus butchery. It is labor-intensive work and that makes it difficult at times but it’s something that we choose to move forward with and work on,” states Palmer.

As part of the kitchen team, the hotel is also supporting five young women at different stages of their skills assessment on the pathway to permanent residency.

“We’ve got a lot of different nationalities which is wonderful, it brings a lot of different ideas into the space. We call it organic learning as well as organic food!”

To add another level of intensity to the kitchen, the hotel also offers several different menus to provide different experiences. Besides a la carte, it also offers a farm tour and degustation menu, as well as a feast menu for larger groups. There is also the Feed Me menu, which is a multi-course offering where the chefs will pick what they think are the most interesting dishes that diners may be less likely to pick themselves.

“It’s really about servicing different markets, different customers, because we do have a huge array of different types of customers. From the very locals to the local community that we underestimated from about two hours away. So over to the coast, the farming areas that will drive an hour and a half to come for dinner. That was a market that we really underestimated over the last few years. And then the tourist market, which is smaller groups looking for more experience-based things,” explains Palmer.

And then to add one more thing into the mix, an Argentinean-style asado barbecue has been installed into the barbecue. Because why not?

Philosophy and reputation

The Watervale Hotel has now been operating for two years, with most of that time under covid restrictions and half of the time with state borders closed. Even with such an introduction into the market the hotel is already garnering quite the reputation and following.

Palmer estimates that 60 per cent of its clientele are tourists, and that many interstate visitors say that they’ve been told they must visit the Watervale Hotel if they go to the Clare Valley. Building that reputation and increasing the word of mouth is the reason why Palmer and Duthy have entered so many awards through different associations. The pair were not expecting so many wins however, with several Best Restaurant triumphs under their belt, as well as a couple of Best Chef wins for Palmer herself.

And while Palmer admits the business is probably not economically sustainable just yet, projections suggest it will be in a few years. She doesn’t expect other pub operators to upend their business models to take on an operation like theirs, she hopes readers take some smaller lessons from what they’re doing.

“Hopefully it gives them the inspiration to look at some of the things they do, some of the products they’re using, some of the waste that’s going out of their kitchen and look at better methods. Maybe look to change some of their habits, because so much of the industry is built on quick, easy habits.”

As all-consuming as the running of both Penobscot Farm and Watervale Hotel is, Palmer says that the philosophies underpinning them are now lifelong for both herself and Duthy.

“It is hard and it is tiring, but we believe so strongly in regenerative farming and healing the earth through what we’re doing and putting more nutritious food on the table that there’s no other way of running a business for us anymore.”

Sustainable practices

Sustainability has been carefully considered throughout every part of the hotel. Here are just some of the products and initiatives implemented throughout the pub:

• Compostable rye straws are provided instead of plastic.

• The hotel uses the only certified home compostable cup in Australia from ‘Compostable Alternatives’, for takeaway coffee.

• The kitchen has changed to using Great Wrap, a fully biodegradable plastic wrap alternative, made from the by-product of potato chips. Watervale buys this at retail price while it waits for the wholesale product to become available.

• In the bathrooms, toilet paper is made from recycled paper. Recycled paper is also used for menus, wine lists, and all other stationery needs. The team have also demanded that all their suppliers move to pdf invoices otherwise they will not use them.

• Pure linen napkins are used on every table including the beer garden. These are washed and ironed in-house.

• A combination of vinegar, baking soda and lemon juice is used for a lot of cleaning in the kitchen followed by soaking and hot soapy water before stronger chemicals are introduced.

• Used cooking oil is used to produce soap using botanicals ie lemon verbena from the farm.

• Meat, bones and some carbohydrate scraps are blended and dehydrated for dog food. A new ‘Canine Canapes’ Dog Menu has been introduced which includes fish scraps and jerky.