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Made right here in Daylesford, this is a dense pudding with rich abundant fruit; raisins, sultanas, currants, orange, lemon, and grapefruit peel and segments, apples, ginger, spices, and a generous dose of dark ale, rum, sherry & Madeira.
900g | $59.50
‘It was sheer madness’: How Alla Wolf-Tasker created the Lake House
Sue Gough Henley | May 2024
There’s a gentle hum as families and friends finish a long lazy lunch in the Lake House dining room, its picture windows overlooking Lake Daylesford framed by the soaring stringybarks Alla Wolf-Tasker planted 44 years ago from saplings bought at a school fete.
I’m chatting with her at the end of a busy weekend. She frets about missing a birthday party in the kitchen, and makes sure one of the chefs waits until a sudden downpour is over before he drives home.
Alla Wolf-Tasker in the gardens at the Lake House in regional Victoria, which has been operating for 40 years. Arsineh Houspian
“We’re a bit of a curiosity,” she says. “As an owner-operated country hotel and restaurant, we’ve not only survived but we’re as good as ever, being on every list that matters in Australia with a record number of chefs’ hats.”
Born after the war to Russian parents in a displaced persons camp in Austria, Alla Wolf-Tasker, AO, is certainly a survivor. With little formal chef’s training, she followed her passion to create the Lake House, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
“This is really a celebration of a journey by two people,” she’s at pains to tell me. “Someone is missing beside me.”
Alla lost her beloved husband and business partner, Allan, to cancer in late 2022 and has been dealing with ovarian cancer herself, yet she’s sustained by her Lake House tribe of 96 full-and part-time staff, including 22 chefs, and her loyal daughter Larissa, son-in-law Robin, who is food and beverage manager, and their five-year-old twins Maya and Alexei.
Family portrait 2012. From left, Larissa, Allan, Alla and Rob.
“Larissa grew up sitting in the corner of the kitchen, filling sugar bowls and cutting butter. She knows everyone, just like her dad. And the twins can already use the measuring stick between tables.”
“It was sheer madness to create a destination Australian country restaurant that was ‘worth the journey’ in 1984. Nobody travelled to regional Australia to eat fine food,” Alla explains. “Local produce amounted to someone leaving a sack of potatoes on the back porch.” And yet, she and Allan persevered through stubbornness and hard work.
“The Lake House is my love letter to hospitality. At the end of the day, it’s important to do something that matters, and I think what we do matters. It’s all about making good nutritious food, sharing it with others, and creating community.”
Alla Wolf-Tasker has done much more than that. She not only kick-started regional destination dining but also, almost single-handedly, created the artisanal farm-to-table movement in Australia.
1989 handwritten menu: $45 per person fixed menu.
She could be called Australia’s Alice Waters who, in the process of creating Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, sparked a national movement in the US toward using local, organic, sustainably sourced food.
But instead of being empowered by the California counterculture movement, for Alla it all started with a £500 dacha, or country house, her parents bought not far from where the Lake House now stands.
Here, they escaped their housing commission flat in Melbourne’s western suburbs to welcome friends with feasts of borscht, homemade sausages, fresh cheeses, sourdough and rye breads, foraged mushrooms, smoked eel, and crocks of fermented vegies. There’d be swimming in the lake, card games, poetry and singing to the accordion. In short, good food and genuine hospitality.
Allan and Alla in 1987; Lake House in 1983; original building in 1982.
After studying Arts at the University of Melbourne, Alla ran away to France in the 1970s to pursue her passion of becoming a chef. She had an epiphany at Roger Vergé’s restaurant near Cannes. “I can still remember his tomato dish. It was Provence.”
Then and there she decided she wanted to open a country restaurant like his.
On returning to Australia, she met Allan, an accomplished artist, who was running the St Kilda Alternative School. She was the cook there, and took the kids to the markets as well as run her own catering business and cooking school. The pair married in 1979 and bought a denuded paddock in Daylesford covered in blackberries and strewn with old cars.
“It took four years to clear it by hand,” she reminisces. “I started planting trees and Allan, who’d studied printmaking and sculpture at RMIT, basically learnt from his father that if you could draw something, you could build it, and he did just that. Both of us are essentially self-taught.
The Lake House dining room. Alla Wolf-Tasker is the managing director, executive chef, and co-proprietor.
“We began as a Friday-to-Sunday BYO 25-seater restaurant as we had to keep our jobs in the city to finance everything. I’d shop the wholesale markets at the crack of dawn then drive up to Daylesford to start preparing the food. My first $29 a-la-carte menu offered delicacies like duck liver parfait and shiraz-glazed squab, which were pigeons shot near the Castlemaine Post Office.
“Most of our customers were salesmen looking for a roast dinner with three veg, so there was a bit of a disconnect. People would say, ‘What on earth are you doing here? This is Daylesford.’ It was a down-at-heel country town surrounded by industrial potato farming. It was so deserted you could shoot a rifle down the main street and not hit anyone.
“Then we got some encouraging reviews about the ‘enchanting Lake House’ and customers started to trickle in. But I needed to develop a local food industry if I was going to fulfil my vision of running a proper country restaurant,” she says.
Dairy Flat Lodge by Lake House.
“I came to realise that the early settler land allocation in Australia went mainly to urban dwellers with no agricultural experience and certainly no understanding of the unique conditions of the Australian environment. By comparison, the peasant classes of Europe had been passing down artisanal production skills from one generation to the next for centuries.”
Alla went on to create Australia’s first producers’ initiative, Daylesford Macedon Produce, to connect local producers and restaurants so that regional food could be used, and money kept in the community.
Not long before COVID-19 struck, the Wolf-Taskers took another leap of faith and bought the rundown 15-hectare Dairy Flat Farm in nearby Musk to fully embrace their farm-to-table philosophy.
“Al worked his magic in the lodge and the team created the five-acre vegetable and flower gardens, planted an orchard, and restored the olive grove and vineyard. We also have beehives and we agist rare-breed cattle and lambs.
Wolf-Tasker with Pedro Parzewski Neves, farm manager Dairy Flat Farm that supplies the food to Lake House. Arsineh Houspian
“But the biggest success story is our Bake House, where we make slow-fermented sourdough breads and scrumptious pastries from locally milled non-GMO grains. These all go to the Lake House, the Dairy Flat Farm Lodge, and to our Wombat Hill Café, which has become a community gathering spot in the Daylesford Botanic Gardens.”
Provenance, relevance, seasonality, and why good food matters. This has always been Alla’s mantra.
“We’ve seen all the fads … the open kitchens and closed kitchens, the wait staff reciting the long list of suppliers. Every cycle of restaurant dining has taught us something, from French technique and Spanish chemistry to Scandinavian foraging and Japanese fish wizardry,” she says. But “at its essence, the restaurant experience must exude warmth, hospitality, generosity, and community”.
“You can do all the ‘gosh wow’ stuff, but the food has still got to be bloody delicious,” she laughs.
Alla is particularly chuffed that people from all over the world have found their way to the door, both to work and to enjoy the hospitality.
“Forty years on, the Lake House and Dairy Flat Lodge really do feel like the places that inspired me to start this journey against the odds all those decades ago.”
I look down on the birch trees her mother planted by the lake and Alla tells me she can still see the gables of her parent’s little dacha from her home on the hill. It feels like the spirit of those long-ago weekend feasts is still all around us.
And, as the last vestiges of summer linger in Central Victoria, I sit in the house that Allan built and savour a flavour bomb of heirloom tomatoes, grilled peach, tomato bavarois and summer herbs. Roger Vergé would be honoured that this feisty daughter of Russian emigrants was so inspired by his cooking that she devoted her life to bringing together the best of the Old and New Worlds in dishes and days like this.
Need to know
Lake House is a country hotel and restaurant in Daylesford, Victoria, with a treetop mineral springs spa, infinity pool and tennis court. Call (03) 5348 3329.
Dairy Flat Lodge and Farm is a luxury farmhouse lodge and regenerative farm in Musk, Victoria. Call (03) 5348 3329.
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