Located flush to the Pacific Highway, about a ten minute drive from Byron’s town centre, Three Blue Ducks’ The Farm is the most ambitious of Byron Bay’s recent arrivals. The baby of Darren Robertson and Mark Labrooy, this 34-hectare property houses an outpost of Three Blue Ducks, a providore with an impressive cheese room and salumeria, a bakery (the Bread Social), a classroom (Milkwood) and a nursery where you can pick up farm-grown sunflowers or a glossy-leafed young fiddle leaf fig.
If you can bear to meet your meal, there’s an elaborate chicken coop right by a wooden children’s playground, and nearby, pens housing farrows of pink and black piglets across an expansive lawn.
The food lives up to the impressive setting. The hay-smoked salmon is firm and subtly fragranced. Roast vegetables (many of them grown on site) and house-made ferments make a spectacular case for eating one’s veggies – vari-texured, balanced, and pleasingly nutty, sweet and sour in turns. The bakery, too, is excellent. It’s hard to go past the Portugese custard tart, which is eggy, sweet and dusted in cinnamon, its flaky pastry only-just holding its runny centre in check.
The Farm’s kitchen closes between 11.45am and 12.15pm, but if you do turn up between seatings, between the bakery and the the Produce Store (yes, that’s its name), there’s plenty to fill up on.