As Halcyon House and its multi-award-winning restaurant, Paper Daisy, celebrate their 10th anniversary this year, executive chef Andrew Milford has a new experience for guests.
Rather than creating multi-night packages for the Savour the Tweed festival, the five-star boutique hotel is offering food-loving guests a complimentary masterclass in Paper Daisy.
The 60-minute masterclass is for in-house guests only and offers the chance to gain a deeper appreciation for the ingredient-led storytelling at Paper Daisy.
Andrew says when it was time to choose the dish for the class, he decided on a Paper Daisy favourite.
“The pipi pasta has been a staple on the menu pretty much the whole 10 years Paper Daisy has been going. This particular one is with a spelt, wholemeal spaghetti, using a Spanish sidra, which is sort of a home-style, quite funky farmhouse cider instead of white wine, garlic and wilted greens, finished with a slightly modified cafe de Paris butter. With other ingredients including green chilli, it has a slightly South Indian flavour.”
While a lot of dishes in the Paper Daisy kitchen involve fire and special techniques, Andrew says he will be guiding guests through steps they can do in their own kitchen.
“Apart from making the pasta, which a lot of people do these days anyway, everything is pretty easy to do at home using a really local ingredient, the area is famous for.”
Advantages of the Tweed
Andrew joined the Paper Daisy kitchen in 2016, where he worked alongside executive chefs Ben Devlin and Jason Barratt before taking over the reins from Jason in 2024. He says one of the advantages of living and working in the Tweed is the wide range of quality, local produce you can use year-round.
“I get a lot of things from Jumping Red Ant Farm, and they grow a lot of Mediterranean varieties of vegetables all year. In some ways, you can be taken as not cooking seasonally when you’ve got zucchini on the menu year-round, but the reality is it’s grown less than 20kms away.”
After growing up in Yeppoon in Central Queensland, Andrew says the European idea of seasons doesn’t really apply in the tropics. And the subtropics of the Tweed have their own rules too.
“The winter veggies I can get locally have really small windows generally. But local means seasonal, whatever other people’s idea of seasonal is.”
A regional area that’s more refined
With a background that includes working at Orpheus Island Resort, Wilson Island Ecolodge and as a private chef in the French Alps, Andrew says his resort experience helped to prepare him for the level of hospitality you need to provide for hotel guests.
“You’re really thinking about their whole stay and giving them variety. If everything’s too much along the same lines, they’ve generally had enough after two nights.”
After almost 10 years in this hatted Cabarita Beach restaurant, Andrew has seen a few changes in the Tweed food scene. And they’re all for the better.
“I think it’s got quite a bit more refined, and for a regional area, I think we punch above our weight, which is thanks a lot to the local produce.”
He says the biggest shift has come since the pandemic, with the change in seafood really standing out.
“The quality of seafood compared to ten years ago has gone through the roof. Knowing what boat or fisherman caught your fish, and trusting their practices to know you’re going to get a top-quality fish, which is going to have a good shelf life. That was almost non-existent ten years ago. Now you know it’s only coming off boats with good reputations for handling their fish.”
To work with the freshest catch, Andrew creates dishes that can be easily adjusted for multiple types of fish.
“Rather than ringing up to ask for a certain amount of fish, they tell me when the boats are landing with what fish. So they’re not sitting around anywhere. That’s been quite amazing, and as far as produce is concerned, the biggest change for me.”
The flourishing food community in the Tweed has also led to the creation of Savour the Tweed, which is back with an expanded program after a sell-out at last year’s inaugural event.
Co-curated by chef and author Christine Manfield and local food advocate Amy Colli, the five-day program from Wednesday 22 to Sunday 26 of October celebrates local farmers, chefs, distillers, cheesemakers and more, while honouring the cultural heritage of First Nations communities.
Halcyon House guests attending one or more Savour the Tweed events can sign up for a complimentary 60-minute masterclass with Andrew, where they will receive an apron as a souvenir while learning to cook pipi pasta, Paper Daisy-style.
