Sara Dining has all the makings of a Hallmark movie. Successful chef swaps his high-stakes career in the Big Smoke for the Simple Life. Picture this: a retired dairy cow rib eye, carved tableside over an open-fire parilla, next to a pile of nettle tortellini stuffed with sheep and goat’s curd. Outside the window, the actual paddock that grew half your dinner. But this isn’t the opening scene of a new flick starring Jennifer Garner. It’s the NSW South Coast’s most anticipated new table.
The star? Chef Alex Prichard – who has just opened his first solo restaurant in Berry, tucked inside Moraea Farm, after he spent years running the kitchen at Icebergs Dining Room and Bar before deciding he no longer wanted to cook for Sydney’s harbour views.
The Chef Who Traded the City for Two Gardens
Prichard didn’t just move to the country and call it a tree change. He built a restaurant around the dirt itself. Alongside his wife Angie, and in partnership with Peter and Nadia Yannopoulos – the duo behind the Linnaeus Collection’s run of considered, un-hotel-like stays around Berry – Prichard set out to let the farm do most of the talking.
“There’s something special about cooking with produce that’s been grown metres from the kitchen,” he says. The goal is ambitious: 80 per cent of the fruit, veg and herbs on the plate grown across Moraea’s two gardens. Not a garnish gesture – an actual supply chain you can walk to.
It shows in how he talks about the food, too. Prichard says the move loosened his grip on aesthetics and pushed him toward a more flexible, produce-first way of cooking – less about plating a concept, more about following what the garden hands him that week.
What’s Actually Landing on the Table
The opening menu runs snacks through to big sharing plates, all built around the South Coast’s genuinely excellent seafood, meat and dairy game. Expect Shoalhaven Sydney rock oysters under a pink peppercorn mignonette, salt and pepper Shoalhaven squid sharpened with Aleppo pepper and lime, and a whole butterflied Shoalhaven flathead off the wood fire, finished in café de Paris butter.
The centrepiece, though, is that parilla-grilled retired dairy cow rib eye, which executes the paddock to plate brief perfectly, before dessert lands on a pavlova – dressed with passionfruit marigold cream and fruit picked straight off Linnaeus Farm that morning.
The Drinks are Just as Excellent
Venue manager Evan Stroeve, formerly of The Waratah Darlinghurst, has built out a wine list that runs deep rather than wide: 500 bottles, 33 by the glass, with the first three pages dedicated entirely to New South Wales producers. The list clearly makes a point about what’s happening in Australian wine right now, rather than leaning on the usual international names to do the heavy lifting.
Cocktails split into highballs, spirits and spirit-forward pours, and the two to watch are both garden-driven: a house martini built on a distillate of mountain marigold and fresh citrus leaves picked around the property, and a mini frozen margarita finished with smoked pear, citrus and garden herbs. Neither reads like a cocktail list filler – both sound like they were built to actually match the food.
The Room Itself
Designers Studio XOX have transformed the original farmhouse’s old garage and workshop into a 60-seat space that leans hard into the property’s natural materials. Think Rosso Orbobico stone, deep plum berry-toned walls, cerise tiling and dark walnut joinery — a palette that feels farmhouse-adjacent without ever tipping into rustic cliche.
It’s the kind of design that makes sense once you know the food philosophy: nothing here is trying too hard, but everything’s been thought through.
Should You Book It?
If you’re already a regular on the Berry–Kangaroo Valley–Gerringong loop, this is the reason to extend the trip into a proper long lunch. If you’re not, it might just be the reason to start. Sara Dining is open for lunch and dinner Thursday through Monday, with bookings live now on the website – and given the pedigree involved (Icebergs alumni, a genuinely serious wine list, a farm doing the growing), it’s not hard to see this becoming one of those South Coast tables people plan entire weekends around.
