Brendan Pratt opens Wayfinder's dining room in Margaret River

Brendan Pratt opens The Dining Room at Wayfinder Winery & Farm in Cowaramup today, putting the former Vasse Felix head chef back in a Margaret River winery kitchen with a one-acre market garden as his main supplier.

The restaurant sits at 381 Brockman Road, next to Wayfinder's new off-grid winery and cellar door, which is already pouring tastings. According to the winery's website it serves lunch from Wednesday to Sunday, 11.30am to 3pm, with an à la carte menu, a tasting menu and a children's menu. Broadsheet reported in July that the room seats 50.

Brendan Pratt's route back to the vines

In Margaret River the garden, not the chef, now writes the lunch menu.

Pratt was born in Perth and trained in London at The Fat Duck, The Ledbury and The Waterside Inn before coming home. He joined Vasse Felix as head chef in 2017, was named Regional Chef of the Year by the WA Good Food Guide in 2021 and left in 2023, later becoming culinary director across Parker Group's Western Australian venues.

At Wayfinder he runs both kitchens: the existing Wine Bar & Restaurant in Dunsborough and the new dining room. In an interview with The Staff Canteen published on September 15, he called restraint “a really clever tool” and said he is “really driven by purpose”.

Opening dishes listed by Hospitality Magazine include scallop with smoked eel, celery and tosazu, and kangaroo with cavolo nero, macadamia and saltbush. Pratt told the magazine the team is “building dishes around the wines by deciding which characteristics to highlight”.

A garden 150 metres from the kitchen

The menu follows a one-acre market garden run by head market gardener Amy Dyson and Bec Davie with organic and regenerative methods. It holds more than 40 no-dig beds, two polytunnels, a greenhouse and over 80 fruit trees, and the farm also produces honey and lamb. “The garden sets the menu,” Pratt says on Wayfinder's website. “There's produce growing 150 metres from the kitchen, and we're getting it at its best possible point.”

The winery next door, designed by the Fremantle studio of Kerry Hill Architects, runs on solar and battery power and is built into a turkey-nest dam so that fruit and wine move by gravity. Head winemaker Andrew Trio leads a vineyard certified organic since 2022, and the company says vintage 2026 is the first made entirely on the estate.

Farm-to-plate lunches are hardly new in Margaret River, where cellar-door restaurants compete for the same weekend drivers. Wayfinder adds its next layer on September 25, when The Lawn opens with snacks such as pickled anchovy toast, with winemaker and garden tours from October. Australia's other headline chef arrival this spring, Dominique Crenn's Petit Crenn in Melbourne, is due in October.