Every day, around 4pm at Etta, a restaurant nestled in the busy Brunswick East end of Lygon Street, you may catch a glimpse of us - the chefs, waiters, bartenders and sommeliers – having our staff dinner. The restaurant is open, mind you, and diners are ushered quickly past our marble kitchen pass on the way to their tables. Their path takes them right past the stack of mismatched bowls piled high with our staff dinner, that they look at with confused expressions on their faces. ‘Is that on the menu? I didn’t see that on the menu online.’

At the end of a gravel driveway on the crest of a hill sits a bluestone farmhouse overlooked by the most enormous eucalyptus this writer has ever seen. Chickens, geese and cats roam freely. A dark, glittering dam pools at the bottom of the rolling green hill. A kangaroo ambles lazily across the grass in the distance.

It starts to feel like tea time. We are in the late afternoon of a scorching October day, which is common on this side of the Mediterranean Sea.