A ten-course chef's counter degustation threaded through Phillip Daffara's produce garden.
Known for Ten-Course Chef's CounterPhillip Daffara KitchenTwo-Hat DegustationProduce Garden Menu
Photo · Emma White / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Why we’d goTwenty seats, one sitting, ten courses, Laura is what happens when a restaurant decides the only honest way to cook from a kitchen garden is to let the garden set the menu.
If the main Pt. Leo restaurant is the grand dining room, Laura is the private chef's counter tucked behind it, intimate, considered, and the place where Phillip Daffara's cooking is allowed to stretch out. Ten courses, one seating of around twenty, and the kind of quiet technical precision that only a small room can deliver.
The garden and the paddocks do most of the work. There's a disciplined restraint to the cooking that feels Japanese in its sensibility, and a wine pairing that moves from estate pinot through a tight selection of Victorian and European bottles. This is the Peninsula at the far edge of what it can do.
Book eight weeks ahead. Lunch over dinner, the afternoon light through the grounds is part of the experience.
Part of Point Leo Estate
Worth knowing
If you only do one thing
Book eight weeks out for a Saturday lunch sitting, add the wine pairing, and plan to be there until the light goes.
Works well with
Tuck's Ridge · Jackalope Hotel
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