Dan Hunter is the chef and owner of Brae in Birregurra, Victoria, awarded 3 Chef Hats by the Australian Good Food Guide in 2026.
Brae has held chef hat recognition from the Australian Good Food Guide for more than a decade. The 3 hat score it carries in the 2026 awards places it among the highest-rated restaurants in the country, recognising sustained excellence rather than a single strong season. Hunter's cooking at Brae is built around the organic farm on which the restaurant sits, a 30-acre property in Birregurra in Victoria's Otways. The AGFG has consistently recognised the kitchen's use of produce, its technical discipline and the coherence of a food philosophy that has remained consistent since the restaurant opened in 2013.
early career
Dan Hunter was born in Melbourne and came to cooking later than most chefs. He began washing dishes in a pub kitchen while working day shifts in a factory assembling light fittings. It was an unpromising start, but the atmosphere of the kitchen held him. He moved into professional cooking in 1999, training at The Oyster Bar in Melbourne before taking positions at Langton's and then Verge over the following four years.
These were solid, mid-level Melbourne kitchens of the early 2000s, not restaurants that attracted international attention, but they gave Hunter the foundation he needed. He was focused and methodical, qualities that would define his approach throughout his career.
Mugaritz and the shaping of a philosophy
In 2005, Hunter moved to Spain to join Mugaritz, the restaurant run by Andoni Luis Aduriz near San Sebastian in the Basque Country. He rose to head chef, a position he held until 2007. The experience was formative in ways that went beyond technique. Mugaritz was, and remains, a kitchen defined by questioning: questioning what a dish needs to be, what an ingredient actually tastes like without intervention, what the purpose of a course is within a larger meal. Hunter absorbed that thinking and brought it home.
He has spoken since about Mugaritz as a place where anything you had learned in other kitchens could become irrelevant, because the restaurant had its own way of working through ideas. That openness to starting from first principles became central to how he would later approach Brae.
Royal Mail Hotel and the first kitchen garden
Hunter returned to Australia in 2007 and took the head chef role at the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld, a small town in western Victoria at the foot of the Grampians. He spent six years there, a long tenure by any measure, and the period proved significant for Australian fine dining in ways that went beyond the restaurant itself.
At Dunkeld, Hunter developed his first intensive organic kitchen garden program. Growing specific ingredients for a restaurant kitchen was not common in Australia at the time, and the discipline of working directly with soil, seasons and growing conditions reshaped how he thought about menus and produce. The Royal Mail Hotel was awarded three hats, named The Age Good Food Guide's Restaurant of the Year in 2011 and received the Gourmet Traveller Regional Restaurant of the Year award four years in a row.
It was a significant period of recognition, but Hunter's thinking was already moving toward something more personal. After six years, he left Dunkeld to build his own restaurant from the ground up.
opening Brae
Brae opened in December 2013 on a 30-acre farm in Birregurra, roughly 90 minutes southwest of Melbourne. The name is a Scottish word for hillside. Hunter bought the property specifically to grow the food that would appear on the menu, a decision that was as much operational as philosophical. If the kitchen grew its own vegetables, herbs, fruit and eggs, then the menu would be governed by what the farm produced, not by what suppliers could deliver.
The restaurant opened with a small team of six kitchen staff. In its first year, it won Restaurant of the Year from its local food guide. The years that followed brought national and then international recognition. By 2017, Brae had been ranked 44th on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. Hunter was named Chef of the Year by both The Age Good Food Guide and Australian Gourmet Traveller in 2016, and AFR Top Chef in both 2016 and 2017.
His first book, Brae: Recipes and stories from the restaurant, was published by Phaidon in 2017. Phaidon had previously produced monographs on Ferran Adria, Rene Redzepi and Virgilio Martinez. Hunter's inclusion placed him in a specific company: chefs defined by a clear point of view rather than simply technical excellence.
the kitchen and the farm
The menu at Brae changes with the farm. Produce is picked close to service, sometimes within the hour. Chickens supply eggs and are used for weed control between the garden beds. The kitchen operates a nose-to-tail approach across proteins, and waste is treated as a design problem rather than an operational inconvenience.
The farm produces vegetables, fruit, herbs, honey and grains. Hunter works with a small number of trusted local suppliers for proteins and anything the farm cannot grow. The menu is a tasting format, running to around fifteen courses, and changes frequently as seasons shift within seasons. A dish built around spring peas in early October is a different dish to one built around the same ingredient three weeks later.
Hunter runs his kitchen with the same methodical approach that marked his early career. He has spoken about the pressure chefs put on themselves being far more demanding than anything a critic can apply. The standards at Brae are internal.
recognition in 2026
The 18 Chef Hat score in the 2026 AGFG awards is consistent with the recognition Brae has received over more than a decade of operation. A 3 hat score in the AGFG system represents exceptional quality of cuisine. For a restaurant that has maintained its standards across twelve years of operation, through the pressures of the pandemic and the ongoing difficulty of running a fine dining venue in a regional location, it reflects something more than a single outstanding service.
Brae was also recognised as Australian Restaurant of the Year by The Age Good Food Guide in 2020, confirming that its standing in Australian dining extends across multiple guides and over an extended period.
Hunter's position in Australian fine dining is well established. What Brae represents, a restaurant built entirely around a specific piece of land and a specific philosophy about how produce should reach the plate, remains one of the clearest expressions of a chef's point of view in the country. More than a decade after opening, the restaurant continues to operate on the same terms it set from the beginning.
