The advancement of the country chef has come a long way since the days that good food in the regions was a rarity. Alla Wolf-Tasker, founder and executive chef of Lake House in Daylesford, remembers a time when heading to the country meant packing a picnic. “Considering how big and wide Australia is, we’ve come a long way,” she says. “Drive an hour out of the major cities and you will find a little general store with local produce or a decent cellar door that might make you a good sandwich, or a decent pub meal. None of those existed. Certainly destination restaurants didn’t exist, and they’re growing now in number and stature. It’s all of the things that we used to go to Europe for.”

The change is thanks to the work of chefs like Wolf-Tasker, who took inspiration and changed the landscape. “My whole journey has been about growing our food community here,” she says. “And the reason for that is that I had spent time in some of the really good regional restaurants of France in the ’70s and managed to insinuate myself into a couple of decent kitchens. What I saw there blew me away. I think I just fell in love with the whole idea of having this restaurant immersed in a region that is really so much part of the environment and fibre of the region.”

It’s this strong movement of regionality that Wolf-Tasker wanted to emulate, rather than “the bad French cuisine, overblown dining rooms and supercilious waiters” that we were aping at the time. “I came back to Australia and thought I could do all of that here. I hadn’t stopped to think about why no one was.”

Pretty quickly she found out. “We had in Australia missed out on that peasant class of farmers who had been on small plots of land for generations, and really cared for and nurtured what they had, because it had to be passed on intact to the next generation.” We had Big-Ag, logging and huge tracts of land ideal for commodity crops; a feeling that we had so much space that land care wasn’t in the forefront of the mind.

“The three pillars of our cuisine when I opened the doors were provenance, seasonality and relevance,” says Wolf-Tasker. It’s taken her decades to create the local food community she envisaged upon those pillars, and with a strong focus on regenerative farming, she has now taken the step from the kitchen to the paddock, with Dairy Flat Farm Daylesford.

“Regenerative farming has to be the future, because just sustainable farming isn’t where it’s at, as it suggests that you’re just going to maintain the status quo. But there is so much repair to be done to soils and to the damage that was done in early farming attempts that I think regenerative farming is the way to go.”

This straddling of production and preparation is what makes the possibilities for country restaurants so exciting. Last year, while dining at the Agrarian Kitchen Eatery in New Norfolk, Tasmania, Rodney Dunn talked us through what we’d eaten and where things had come from. Hands like a compass, he mapped out the provenance, pointing to the community garden, or towards his own property, and over the ridge, and down the inlet. It was more than a nice show; proof that provenance is at his core, and for a country chef of substance this is an imperative.

The challenges for a country chef are supply. The rural or regional idyll would have you think that it’s an easier job, but supply chains are often dysfunctional, and chefs have to work at relationships. In reality, capital city chefs can easily get anything from anywhere, without much thought about who and where it’s from. It may still be Australian, but there’s not necessarily a relationship to consider.

“A producer sent me a list and it only had three things on it; one of them I wanted, two of them I didn’t really need,” says Analiese Gregory of Franklin in Hobart. “But I was like, ‘well you know I need to support them’ because it’s about relationships down here, and when they do have stuff, they will offer it to us as well. There’s an element of mutual support. In the big city I was kind of like, ‘well if I don’t want them, someone else will take them’. You wouldn’t think about what would happen. Whereas here, I’ll just take it and we’ll do something.”

I’ve seen raised beds filled with neglected herbs touted as a kitchen garden, but I prefer to think of those that captivated me with a clear link from the plate to the garden and the farm. Guy Jeffreys at Millbrook Winery, perhaps Western Australia’s most well known chef-come-gardener. I can’t remember a meal at Millbrook where I haven’t ended up in the acre patch. Or Kareena Armstrong at McLaren Vale’s Salopian Inn, where many of the standout dishes of a late summer meal came from their own garden.

While many of the notable names in country dining are restaurants that are more the preserve of city blow-ins, there are those breathing life into the country pub. Warrick Duthy and Nicola Palmer run both the Watervale Hotel, near Clare, and Penobscot Farm. With ambitious plans underway, they’re renovating a pub, farming on biodynamic lines – albeit uncertified – and bringing young talent to the district to work between the farm and the kitchen. They’re creating a model of connection that stretches beyond the expectations of a country pub.

So too is James Campbell, chef and owner at the Bunyip Hotel in Cavendish, Western Victoria. “It is a really important thing that we’re doing here,” says Campbell without a hint of piousness. “Because what matters is that this place, the Bunyip, is to me like the campfire of the district. It’s where people come in on Friday night or Saturday, gather round and they’ll bump into each other and talk. And it’s a beautiful environment to be in. It’s a special thing.”

For nearly 15 years, Campbell was part of growing the Movida brand, acting as a head chef from Melbourne to Sydney, but he “ran out of steam”. While he’s glad of what his early career gave him, proud of the work he and his team achieved, the chef says he “felt an emptiness; like a sugary diet: it doesn’t nourish you spiritually and mentally, and I was pretty much worn out”. A return to the family farm in the Grampians gave Campbell the time to reconnect with the country and his passion for cooking, before putting in motion a plan to rejuvenate the Bunyip.

“It’s really about embracing everything I love about the industry and not doing the things I don’t like,” he explains. “You don’t need a million-dollar fit-out, every whiz-bang thing in the kitchen, you don’t need matching cutlery or posh plates; you just need a hot plate and a good oven. The money goes on the product.” Campbell says 95 per cent of produce is from within 100 kilometres. “I want some lamb, I want some pork, I ring the farmer; it’s real paddock to plate. I don’t oversell that, because to me it’s as it should be.”