The Secret Garden

Chef Sean Moran invites the GT crew for a rustic lunch at his Bilpin Springs property, where he shares his farm-to-table favourites.

- Jordan Kretchmer

Chef Sean Moran’s Blue Mountains farm is a relatively short drive from Sydney, and is a property that’s as beautiful as it is productive. The working farm, known as Bilpin Springs, grows much of the produce that ends up on diner’s plates at Moran’s much-loved Bondi restaurant Sean’s Panaroma.

“The farm is the core of everything we do really, because it’s like our canvas,” says Moran. It’s a beautiful and bucolic canvas indeed. There are sprawling rows of apple, mulberry, orange and fig trees, many of which bloom year-round thanks to the rich soil (the property was formerly a fruit orchard, like many of the surrounding Bilpin farms). There’s rows of dahlias, carrots, lettuce and herbs, alongside chickens, a friendly llama, waddling geese, showy peacocks and two fluffy Maremma pups, who are set to become the guardian dogs for the egglaying chickens.

Moran and his partner Michael “Manoo” Robertson have had the property for almost 15 years, but continue to learn more about the land each day.

“Growing my food keeps teaching me. It hasn’t stopped. You learn stuff every day, like the timing of pruning, the thinning of fruit, the weather, the amount of rain, how something’s flavour changes from one season to the next,” says Moran.

Much like Moran’s restaurant, there is an instant homeliness and warmth that radiates from the land, the farmhouse that sits on it, and the kitchen inside. “Growing food is a natural sort of friend of cooking, it just makes sense,” says Moran.