Our Story

We are a team of two. We are your chefs and your hosts, dedicated to producing food with authentic passion and delivering a quality experience. We are also very devoted parents to our two daughters ages 9 and 13.

We love simply beautiful food and wine and quietly enjoying time & conversation with each other, with our young family and with good friends.

Our love of food and wine developed during our times touring vineyards and cellar doors across Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia. It wasn’t about speed dating through wine tastings, instead it was about the late lunches and afternoon grazing. The pleasure of sitting down with each other and enjoying a glass or 2 of wine coupled with the variety of tastes that are best showcased on beautifully presented share boards.

Driven by a strong passion for food, wine and a regional lifestyle we restored an historic Blacksmith’s Cottage in the renowned Grampians Wine Region of Western Victoria and created a bespoke dining destination called Steel Cutters Cottage.

We had the pleasure of meeting and serving a wonderful array of guests visiting us from local and international locations, received dozens of incredibly amazing and humbling reviews and received several regional hospitality awards… all in such a short and late career in Hospitality.

Our passion for French Provincial and Mediterranean foods had us yearning to explore France and Italy with our girls. We sold our home and had big goals for our 2020 midlife retirement…  to immerse ourselves in the food culture of Provincial France and Italy, and upon our return, locate to a warmer climate. We have had a 23-year long love affair with Fiji and after our 2019 holiday, a question was posed. Where is the equivalent location in Australia? A line was drawn, and it pointed to Port Douglas.

Sadly we didn’t make it to France and Italy in 2020 as we had hoped, but we did make it to Queensland in May 2020.

Fast forward to April 2021 and we opened Epicurean Port Douglas to share our love of food and wine with Port Douglas locals and visitors.

Watch our story courtesy of the Do It In Douglas team and the Douglas Shire Council.