One of WA’s most vital food stories is now even more compelling – and delicious

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Have you ever tried sunflower?

No, not sunflower oil, sunflower seeds or sunflower vodka – wait, what? – but the plant itself. Me neither.

Or at least, I hadn’t until earlier this week, when I got to taste helianthus annuus via a painterly arrangement of fried sunflower head and crunchy things (chickpeas, seeds, grains) strewn across a bed of chunky hummus.

While there were other bits of sunflower anatomy on the plate – the plant’s King Gee-gold petals, say, plus some slow-cooked sunflower in the hummus – the sunflower head was the dish’s MVP: a handful of lightly fried, two-bite mouthfuls of greenery that made me think of broccoli stem, only nuttier, better built and more fun at parties. It also made me think, why aren’t we eating more sunflowers?

To be fair, sunflowers aren’t something you see in most supermarket fruit and veg aisles. One place that you will find them, though, is in the garden rows that dissect 11 Acre Farm: a former equestrian centre in Forrestdale that’s been rehabilitated according to syntropic agroforestry principles (a form of regenerative farming) plus no small amount of hard yakka from the Erceg family, the property’s owners since 2020.

11 Acre Farm is also home to Cubby Cafe, an all-day eatery slinging harvest bowls, burgers, muffins and other brunchy favourites using ingredients grown on-site. Or at least 11 Acre Farm was.

Late last year, Cubby Cafe moved out of the former hay shed that it called home and reinvented itself as Cubby Kiosk, an al fresco, food truck-inspired counter pitched at those that come here to coo at the residents of the animal farm, frolic in the cubby house village built out of Facebook Marketplace discards, plus other examples of Getting Out in Nature™.

Moving the casual food offering outdoors wasn’t just about streamlining things for peak-time crowds – QR code ordering ahoy! – it was also about freeing up enough collective bandwidth among the crew in the restaurant so that they could set their sights higher than scrambled eggs, French toast and flat whites. (But just so the rest of us knew it too, the Ercegs also made the change public by renaming the dining room as The Good Paddock.) The staff have grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

To paraphrase Dolly Parton, and, more famously, Whitney Houston: I will always love the roast fennel and butter bean soup that the restaurant’s chef Fendi Bong was serving last winter.

But I’m equally, if not more smitten, with his yuzu-perfumed Shark Bay prawns: shell on, split, grilled until just opaque and served with a pert burnt tomato salsa plus a wondrous flatbread packing just enough desiccated coconut to bring some cool sweetness to the table.

Fatty striploin isn’t typically used when preparing beef tataki – the Japanese classic of rare grilled beef with a soy sauce dressing is traditionally made with fillet – nor is the dish showered with microgreens and discs, but non-traditional, as we all know, doesn’t have to mean not-delicious.

Asian sauces feel like a strength of Indonesian-born, Australian-trained Fendi who counts Icebergs Dining Room in Sydney and Charlie’s in Darwin as former ports of call. I dig the bite of the nam chim served with meaty grilled ruby snapper plus a sprawling salad of leaves and shredded mango from the garden.

I already waxed lyrical about that sunflower dish, but there are other things on the new “snacks” menu you should know about. Like the fior di latte on Mary Street sourdough that celebrates nearby Borrello Cheese in Oakford. Or the jam of strawberry and estate rhubarb and golden, Zuni-style pickled zucchinis that are splendid accompaniments for a fat rocher of chicken liver pâté that’s lush and savoury rather than simply sweet.

Just as the name-change gave Bong the freedom to cook more than (just) cafe – The Good Paddock still does breakfast – the rebrand has allowed personable restaurant manager Kelly Pitman to finesse the guest experience.

Upbeat service staff patrol the room in smart leather aprons. The restaurant now opens for Saturday dinner. The menu has been repackaged into a snazzy A5 format: all the better to showcase the interesting yet approachable suit of drinks that Pitman has collated.

Although Cubby Cafe was also licensed, building the new bar right in the restaurant’s entry feels like management’s way of quietly telling guests it’s OK to order a shiraz to go with their lamb. The rest of the dining room – a welcoming space that owes as much as it does to Kinfolk as it does The Farmer Wants a Wife – remains more or less unchanged. A good thing, as the owners got the feel of the room right straight off the bat.

While it’s still early days in The Good Paddock’s farm-to-plate journey – questions of “was that grown here?” aren’t answered with quite as many yeses as you’d hear at, say, Glenarty Road or Millbrook – the restaurant already feels like it’s headed in a similar trajectory.

It’s worth mentioning that it’s more accessible than its peers, both in terms of proximity to the city centre and its price point.

The result? An irresistible, aspirational restaurant that remains one of WA’s most vital food stories, even more so following this latest plot twist.

I can’t wait to watch (and taste) the journey unfold.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.