Meelup Farmhouse is a casual farmhouse restaurant in Western Australia’s Eagle Bay offering a fresh take on the quintessential Australian brunch.
You can’t get any more Western Australian than Meelup Farmhouse. The charming restaurant, located within a farm property in an isolated copse near Eagle Bay in Western Australia’s Cape Naturaliste headland, is pretty much everything you’d imagine Western Australia to be.
It’s even part of a quaint hobby farm, home to some Silkie chickens, a couple of goats, a Highland cow, and – bizarrely but rather not so surprisingly – even a family of South American Alpacas. And of course, Mila the farmhouse dog to make sure the entire menagerie behave themselves.
The restaurant itself is a beautiful, tastefully-designed modern structure of wood, steel and stone, and looks very much like the classy contemporary wine tasting rooms scattered further south in Western Australia’s Margaret River winemaking region. Inside the space is bright and cheery, but where you want to be is the absolutely comfortable open patio; here you’ll get to bask closer to the beauty of nature that is the Meelup Regional Park while still being protected from the elements.
Then there’s the grub. Meelup Farmhouse offers the kind of Australian repast far too many Singapore cafes aim to recreate but fail all too miserably. Open during the day on most days – sans Tuesdays and Wednesdays – you’re looking at dishes that encapsulate the quintessential Aussie brunch experience.
Perhaps its the close access to the Western Australian largesse from land and sea that provide a bounty of ingredients that most fine dining chefs would be happy to trade a liver for. We were there at Meelup Farmhouse for brunch, and the eggs in our orders – like the chilli scrambled egg, the baba ganoush poached eggs, or any of the takes on the English breakfast – were so fresh you can almost hear the clucks of protest from the hens they were liberated from.
Then there’s the ongoing Aussie love affair for sourdough; here it’s sourced from Yallingup Woodfired Bread, a veritable South-west institution devoted to baking loaves of sourdough goodness. You’ll find the bakery’s much-beloved fruit bread, here simply turned into toast and served with butter and jam, or their excellent wheat and rye bread served with almost every other brunch offering.
Our favourites? The chilli scrambled egg, in particular, because of the glorious smoky slab of charsiu pork belly accompanying it. Or the lovely trio that is sweetcorn fritters, poached eggs and chunks of blue swimmer crab.
We’d imagine lunch options would similarly be excellent too.
There’s some lovely coffee served at Meelup Farmhouse, but there’s nothing – absolutely nothing – stopping you from partaking in some booze with your brunch. You can expect a swathe of taps dispensing top-notch Western Australian craft beers from the likes of Rocky Ridge or Eagle Bay, for example, or even a range of cocktails to wash your lunch down with. And of course, a curated list of wines mostly from Margaret River or the Great Southern further south.
If you want to get even closer to nature, Meelup offers picnic baskets so you can lounge outdoors as well.
And that is about as Western Australia as it gets.
[Images courtesy of Meelup Farmhouse]
Meelup Farmhouse (Cape Naturaliste)
Address 54 Sheens Rd, Naturaliste WA 6281, Australia (Google Maps link)
Opening Hours 9am to 5pm Mondays, Thursdays to Sundays; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays
Tel (61) 8 9756 8848
Web www.meelupfarmhouse.com.au
Facebook meelupfarmhouse
Instagram @meelupfarmhouse_
