Wickens at Royal Mail Hotel is a destination restaurant rooted in a place of rare natural drama — the small township of Dunkeld, at the southern foot of the Grampians, where the flat pastoral plains of western Victoria meet the ancient granite faces of Mt Sturgeon and Mt Abrupt. It is the kind of place that asks something of you: a deliberate journey to a landscape that feels genuinely remote and genuinely alive.
The kitchen answers honestly to that landscape. Up to 80 per cent of produce is grown on-site and harvested daily, with the neighbouring farm supplying beef and lamb raised specifically for the dining room. The philosophy is one of deep provenance — flavour cultivated in the soil before it is ever refined in the kitchen.
Robin Wickens arrived at the Royal Mail Hotel in 2013, making one of regional Australia's most storied kitchen programs thoroughly his own. Originally from Southampton, he trained across leading London restaurants before arriving in Australia, where he opened the critically acclaimed Interlude in Fitzroy and was named The Age Young Chef of the Year in 2005. In 2017, the restaurant was reimagined entirely. A new structure by Byrne Architects — a dramatic charcoal cube reached by a boardwalk through native scrub — became its new home, with floor-to-ceiling glass framing unobstructed views of the Grampians and tables crafted from locally quarried Dunkeld sandstone.
Within a year of reopening it earned Two Hats in the 2019 Good Food Guide and Regional Wine List of the Year. The cellar holds 30,000 bottles, including the largest privately owned collection of Bordeaux and Burgundy in the Southern Hemisphere. It is matched by a 1.2-hectare kitchen garden driving a seasonal tasting menu that could only exist here.