Twenty years on, Ten Minutes by Tractor still stops our restaurant critic in her tracks

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When Ten Minutes By Tractor opened on the Mornington Peninsula in 2006, regional Victorian dining looked very different than it does today. In fact, you could say the same about fine dining in general. The audiences were different, as well as the expectations. Customers were in it for the luxury, the pampering, the fanciness and, yes, the food and wine.

These days, we ask so much of our restaurants, particularly on the higher end. We want a sense of place alongside our sense of occasion; we want fun as well as luxury. Most places that have survived the past 20 years needed to undergo some form of reinvention.

In Ten Minutes By Tractor’s case, part of that was forced by a devastating fire in 2018 that required the restaurant to be rebuilt. But in many other ways, the changes have been subtle.

This is still a restaurant that trades mainly in the kind of opulence that was popular when it opened. The set menus range from $145 to $290 per person and are peppered with ingredients like wagyu, caviar and even gold leaf. The place still screams classic wine country luxe: taupe, wood, botanical prints, windows facing out over the vineyard.

Twenty years is an incredible run in the restaurant business, especially when you throw fires and global pandemics into the mix.

Late last year, it was announced that Craig Lunn would be responsible for ushering in “a new era” in the kitchen. The English-born chef has worked at a number of Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe and the Middle East, ones with names that end in “Ramsay” and “Ducasse”.

In Ten Minutes By Tractor’s semi-open kitchen, he and his team are crafting meticulous, intricate dishes that are, mostly, as delicious as they are pretty. The sense of place is hammered home with a card dropped on the table that lists local producers and shows their geography relative to the restaurant, plus there’s a focus on matching food to the wine made on site.

Snacks start things off, a trio of sea and paddock: spanner crab and yuzu in a choux pastry bun; tuna belly with nori and finger lime; wagyu tartare with white miso and a scrap of that gold leaf – fat and acid and luxury.

In late summer, heirloom tomatoes were served with a herb sorbet that leaned a little too sweet for my liking. Raw scallops with a lovely scoop of caviar were overwhelmed by the stridence of jalapeno (and the distinctive aroma of the compound pyrazine) folded through the zucchini brunoise underneath the seafood. This is a dish that has so many bells and whistles – a milky pearl chain that I’m assuming was made with reverse spherification or some other high-tech method; a fan of cucumber precisely arranged atop the seafood – but the core ingredients lose their essence in all the technique.

These small complaints are forgotten when a zebra-striped tortellini arrives, stuffed with Moreton Bay bug and surrounded by a rich tarragon froth, a dish so fun and striking and delicious it takes you by surprise. Here, the kitchen gets the balance of whiz-bang technique and purity of flavour exactly right.

There’s a lovely balance, too, to the wagyu that comes at the end of the savoury courses, thanks to a tumble of fermented lettuce with the nutty-spicy Korean sauce ssamjang that accompanies it. I would be happy to see every high-end meal ending in wagyu, but Lunn understands that if you’re going to serve a meat this rich and fatty, you need to balance it with something bracing.

Liquid nitrogen makes its appearance at dessert, its dry-ice smoke wafting over a tart apple sorbet, while a Milawa blue cheese tart has a quieter kind of drama, topped with a layer of fig gelee and garnished with a crown of tiny leaves and flowers, like a fairy’s headdress.

The wine program these days is overseen by Noah Rozenfeld, formerly of three-hatted Amaru in Armadale and city restaurant Circl (also hatted). His is a thrilling, wide-ranging list that he presents with joy and passion. It’s worth getting one of the pairings (between $80 and $495) just to soak up as much of his knowledge as possible.

It’s wonderful to see cocktails getting as much care as the food, too, with touches like a house-made triple sec (using local citrus) making for a fantastic margarita.

Twenty years is an incredible run in the restaurant business, especially when you throw fires and global pandemics into the mix. The current team here certainly has the talent and passion to see the restaurant well into its next decade.

If you’re looking for luxury ingredients, a lovely view and all the bells and whistles of classic fine dining, Ten Minutes By Tractor still delivers in spades.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.