Among Growers, Cooks and Friends
Words Kylie Verkerk
With Savour the Tweed approaching, food writer Karlie Verkerk reflects on the growers, cooks, restaurants and shared tables that have shaped her first year on the Tweed Coast.
A year is not a long time to know a place. It’s long enough to learn your way around, to find your favourite coffee, and to recognise the signs of an afternoon storm. But the deeper knowledge of a region – its food, its people and the connections between them – takes longer. Or perhaps, if you’re lucky, it begins with an intimate lunch.
Standing in the kitchen garden at Potager in Carool, I breathe in the scent of sun-warmed herbs as freshly shucked oysters and golden beef croquettes make their way around the guests. Below, the valley disappears beneath sheets of rain. Up here on the ridge, though, the sun is shining and the garden beds are overflowing.
I’m at the launch of the third Savour the Tweed festival, and before we sit down for lunch, festival co-curator Christine Manfield takes us through this year’s program. Running from 21–25 October, Savour the Tweed brings together growers, cooks and makers to explore the diverse region and the relationships that make the Tweed such a special place.
Coming from a career in publishing, I’ve spent years telling other people’s stories, but here I’ve found myself becoming part of one.
Finding a sense of home through food
The first place that began to feel familiar was Raven Place in Clothiers Creek. Michelle Kuramochi’s Japanese food truck has become a reliable ritual for my family. We return often enough that it now feels less like going out for lunch and more like dropping in to see a friend who happens to make excellent gyoza.
The same feeling follows me to Pipit in Pottsville.
Long before I lived here, I travelled to Thailand with owners Ben Devlin and Yen Trinh, alongside restaurateur and organic farmer Palisa Anderson of Boon Luck Farm. We visited Palisa’s family farm outside Bangkok, walking through fields, learning about traditional Thai ingredients, and eating food that had travelled only metres before reaching our plates.
I never imagined that years later I would be living down the road from Ben and Yen’s beautiful restaurant, and Palisa’s farm in Tyagarah. Life has a peculiar way of folding back on itself.
All of these threads, once scattered across different cities, countries and stages of my career, now intertwine here on the Tweed. They remind me that this industry is built on remarkably small circles of trust, generosity and shared curiosity.
The people behind Savour the Tweed 2026
It’s one of the reasons I feel particularly drawn to the Bistro Livi x Boon Luck Farm dinner that is part of this year’s festival.
Introduced through a mutual friend, I came to know sisters and owner-operators Nikky and Danni, whose warmth and generosity are at the heart of their European-inspired bistro in Murwillumbah. More than a collaboration, it feels like an invitation into the close-knit community they’ve each built around food.
Another standout event I’ve marked in my calendar is a river cruise with Bundjalung chef Mindy Woods.
As a fellow MasterChef alumna, I’ve admired Mindy’s work for years, and her ability to share stories through food.
As guests glide along the Tweed River, Mindy will share her guung butherun – water stories that speak to the sacred, life-giving forces of waterways and their connection to health, culture and Country.
Together with chef and co-curator Christine Manfield, Mindy will prepare a menu that honours the river and the traditional foods that have sustained Bundjalung people for thousands of years.
Seeing the river through Mindy’s eyes promises something richer than a meal alone. It offers another way of understanding the place many of us are lucky to call home.
Discovering the Tweed through its produce
The older I get, the less interested I become in food as performance. I’m far more drawn to the humble roadside stall overflowing with locally grown sweet potatoes, with nothing more than a set of scales and an honesty box, the handwritten signs advertising local bananas, and the conversations with growers at the markets that always teach me something new.
Perhaps that is what has surprised me most about settling on the Tweed Coast. The food here is inseparable from the landscape and the people who work it.
At Potager, as we finish an exceptional multi-course lunch, plates are cleared, glasses emptied and conversations continue long after the preserved mango and lemon myrtle bomb Alaska is devoured. Nobody seems in any hurry to leave, and neither am I.
For someone whose life has always revolved around food, moving here has reminded me why I fell in love with it in the first place.
Savour the Tweed runs from 21–25 October 2026. Visit savourthetweed.com.au for this year’s full program.
