Bermagui's Mimosa Wines has been voted into Australia's top 50 restaurants for 2023 as revealed by OpenTable in November.
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Aymeric Grand and his wife Tilly bought the restaurant from her parents, Glenn and Gail Butson, in 2020.
The young couple had been on an extensive world trip before settling down to have children.
The Butsons wanted to sell the business in Murrah, 15 kilometres south of Bermagui.
"I always thought this place had enormous potential," Mr Grand said.
"We have a creek, three neighbours we can't see and are surrounded by national parks."
The couple left their jobs in Sydney to run the business.
Mr Grand now has six full-time staff, including himself, and works alongside head chef Jan Semmelhack and sous chef Fred Jones.
"Jan was backpacking here and got stuck with the Black Summer bushfires while Fred was travelling around Australia looking for his next gig."
Mr and Mrs Butson bought the 230-acre property in 1978, moving there from Melbourne with three children in the early 1980s after the house was built.
"They started the vineyard from nothing in 1999."
At its peak, the seven-acre vineyard produced 15,000 bottles of wine a year.
They built and opened the restaurant in 2008 when the remote location was still on a dirt road, doing it all without a background in hospitality.
"It is incredible,' Mr Grand said. "The failure rate of new businesses, let alone hospitality businesses, is so high. All credit to them for the vision."
The vineyard has fallen into decline, partly due to poor soil and disease. The last harvest was in 2018.
Mr Grand has replanted vines but says "we are a gastronomic restaurant before anything else".
The family-owned business offers a two- or three-course lunch and a six-course set dinner and sources as much produce as possible locally, offering Australian and New Zealand wines, mostly organic, and will begin highlighting Canberra wines.
OpenTable's Top 50 Restaurants in Australia for 2023 list is generated from more than 110,000 OpenTable diner reviews and dining metrics from September 1, 2022 to August 31, 2023.
Restaurants with a minimum threshold of diner reviews were considered and evaluated by a compilation of unique data points, including diner ratings, the percentage of five-star reviews, the number of alerts set, the percentage of reservations made in advance and direct searches.
Metrics were weighted to comprise an overall score, used to rank the list.
The resulting list appears A-Z, not in ranked order.
