The Heavy Table is not a restaurant. I don't have a liquor licence, a team in the kitchen, or a wine list. What I have is a heavy table I built myself, a kitchen garden 20 metres from the stove, and the time to cook in a way that most restaurants abandoned a decade ago.
Every other Saturday I cook lunch for 10 people at my home in Ocean Grove. The menu is set because I've spent the week building it around what's fruiting in the garden and what I can do with time that a restaurant kitchen can't afford to spend. A restaurant gives you choice. I give you trust. You turn up, sit down, and let me feed you the best meal I know how to make right now, with what I have, the way I think it should be done.
I start on Thursday. Stock goes on Thursday evening. The sous vide follows—something tough and humble, given 36 hours at a careful temperature until it becomes something else entirely. The dehydrator has been running since midweek, turning whatever's abundant into something you can't buy. By Saturday morning the slow work is done and I'm cutting herbs from the garden, setting the table I made, arranging the chairs I built.
A hatted restaurant in 2026 does extraordinary things—60 covers a night, 12-minute windows, plates that look painted. But that model has costs. A two-day stock doesn't scale. Herbs cut an hour before service aren't part of the supply chain. A 36-hour braise doesn't fit the labour budget. I can do those things because I'm not feeding 60 people—I'm feeding 10, once a fortnight, and I've built my life around having the time to do them properly.
The marquetry board the main arrives on is hand-cut and hand-inlaid. If the doors are open you can hear the chickens whose eggs are in the custard. I don't make a speech about any of this. It's just the house you're eating in.
I plate the first course and bring it out, then I sit down with you for the rest of the meal. I'm not in the kitchen while you're finishing your wine. The conversation is as much a part of the afternoon as the food, and by the time dessert arrives you're three hours deep and the table has done what a table is supposed to do.
People come to restaurants for consistency and choice. They come here for the opposite—for a meal that could only happen on this specific Saturday, in this specific kitchen, with these specific ingredients. Next fortnight the menu will be different because the garden will be different and I'll have spent the week thinking about something new.
You arrive not knowing everyone at the table and you leave three hours later with new friends. That's the point. Not the plating, not the technique—the table. The sitting down together and the unhurried passing of time over food that was finally given all the attention it deserved.
$90 a head. BYO. Fortnightly. Ten seats. First lunch June 6th 2026. Newsletter subscribers get first invites: subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to know when bookings open.