A new edition of FNQ Food Magazine, a tenth anniversary, and a food region that has finally learnt to make some noise about itself.
Ten years ago, FNQ Food Magazine wasn't born because the world desperately needed another food publication. Heaven knows there were already enough glossy magazines explaining how to turn beetroot into architecture or arrange three peas on a plate as though dinner had become a branch of civil engineering.
It existed because Far North Queensland had something much rarer.
An industry punching well above its weight, yet nowhere to tell its own story.
That always struck me as odd. We were growing ingredients that chefs in Sydney and Melbourne would have cheerfully claimed as their own had geography been kinder. Fishermen were hauling extraordinary seafood from waters most Australians knew from postcards. Coffee was being grown on the Tablelands. Cocoa was becoming chocolate near Mission Beach. Black pepper was growing at Silkwood. Dairy farmers around Millaa Millaa were producing the sort of milk that reminds you milk is supposed to taste of something. Brewers, distillers, bakers, butchers, growers and restaurateurs were quietly getting on with the business of being very good indeed.
The stories were everywhere. They just lived in different places.
Across a prep bench before service. At Rusty's on Friday morning. In the back of a brewery. Beside a packing shed. Leaning against the tray of a ute somewhere west of Mareeba while somebody explained, at considerable length, why this particular mango was vastly superior to every mango I'd previously eaten.
Quite often they were right.
Everybody seemed to know everybody, but nobody was joining the dots.
So we thought we'd have a crack.
The original idea for FNQ Food was to give the industry somewhere to see itself. A rallying flag, if you like, for an extraordinary collection of people who were individually doing remarkable things without necessarily realising how impressive the collective picture had become.
Ten years later, that picture looks rather different.
The produce hasn't suddenly become good. It always was. What's changed is the confidence surrounding it.
You see it in restaurants where the provenance of an ingredient matters as much as the technique used to cook it. Chefs know growers by name. Growers increasingly understand that visitors want to meet them. Distilleries and breweries have become attractions in their own right. Farm gates have become destinations. People arrive in Far North Queensland asking where the coffee is grown, which boat catches the fish and whether they can visit the place that makes the cheese.
The answer, pleasingly often, is just up the road.
There has been a broader change too.
For much of FNQ's tourism history, food had a fairly straightforward job. People came for the Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics rainforest, became hungry at approximately six o'clock and required feeding. Preferably somewhere with a nice view.
Nobody is suggesting the Reef has suddenly become the warm-up act for a plate of prawns. That would be ridiculous, even by the occasionally excitable standards of food journalism. But food now occupies a very different place in the visitor experience.
This year provided perhaps the clearest evidence yet.
Listening to Tourism Tropical North Queensland discussing food alongside aviation, destination marketing and major events was quietly satisfying. Ten years ago, that conversation would have seemed ambitious. Today it seems entirely sensible.
Tasting the Tropics took the idea further, bringing restaurants, producers, cafés, hotels, farms, tourism operators and drinks makers into a broader regional food celebration. It didn't create FNQ's food culture. That has been developing for generations. What it did was give the region another opportunity to speak about that culture collectively.
And that matters.
Because the great strength of Far North Queensland has never been one famous restaurant or one celebrated chef.
It's the extraordinary concentration of things happening within a relatively small geographical area.
Drive for a couple of hours and the scenery, climate and contents of your lunch can change completely. Reef fish and prawns along the coast. Beef and dairy across the Tablelands. Bananas, papaya and tropical fruit through the Cassowary Coast. Coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, vanilla, pepper, macadamias and ingredients many Australians would struggle to identify without assistance.
Then there are the people who take all of that and turn it into something worth eating.
Some work in restaurants with serious wine lists and beautifully pressed linen. Others operate cafés, pubs, bakeries, food trucks, market stalls and tiny businesses you've probably driven past twenty times without noticing.
They all count.
Indeed, one of the pleasures of producing FNQ Food for ten years has been discovering just how little correlation there is between the size of a business and the quality of its story.
We've also had our share of unpleasantness.
Cyclones. Floods. COVID. Freight problems. Staff shortages. Insurance premiums apparently calculated by throwing darts at very large numbers. Rising food costs, electricity bills and the peculiar economics of operating a hospitality business in a place where both weather and infrastructure occasionally develop a sense of humour.
Businesses have closed. Others have changed hands. Some disappeared and are still missed.
New ones arrived.
And the industry carried on.
I hesitate to use the word resilience because we've worn it nearly transparent over the past few years. Nobody opens a restaurant because they dream of demonstrating resilience. They'd generally prefer customers, reliable refrigeration and a Friday night where everybody who booked actually turns up.
But there is something characteristically FNQ about the industry's ability to absorb a wallop, swear briefly, find a mop and open again.
This tenth-anniversary edition celebrates that industry as it is now.
Inside you'll find the restaurants and cafés, producers and growers, bars, breweries, distilleries, markets and food experiences that make eating and drinking your way around Far North Queensland such an entertaining business. Some names have appeared in these pages before. Others are new. That's precisely as it should be. A food culture worth writing about should never sit still long enough to become comfortable.
And after ten years, some thanks are overdue.
Magazines have an annoying habit of putting one person's name beneath the word Editor, giving the entirely false impression that they spring fully formed from a keyboard.
They don't.
To Jodie Scurrah, whose energy, persistence and ability to make improbable things happen have carried FNQ Food through a decade of deadlines; to Liagi Mateo, who has rescued more half-baked ideas than I care to admit and somehow made them look deliberate; to our writers, photographers, contributors, sales team and everyone who has worked behind the scenes over the years, thank you.
Thank you to Tourism Tropical North Queensland and our regional tourism and local government organisations who continue to champion the people producing and serving food across this enormous patch of the tropics.
Thank you to every advertiser who has backed us. Regional publishing doesn't survive on warm feelings and complimentary entrées. Businesses have supported this magazine because they believe there is value in having a strong independent platform talking about FNQ food, and without them there simply wouldn't be ten years of publishing history sitting online and on the shelf.
And, particularly, thank you to the industry.
To the farmers who stopped what they were doing to show us around. The chefs who let us invade kitchens at spectacularly inconvenient moments. The fishers, butchers, bakers, baristas, brewers and distillers who patiently explained things we probably should have understood before arriving. The restaurant owners who found twenty minutes during service. The publicans who told stories that subsequently required substantial editing.
And to every reader who picked up a copy, followed a food trail, tried somewhere new, bought something local or told us we'd missed their favourite restaurant and really ought to get our act together.
Thank you too.
Ten years ago, we thought FNQ's food industry deserved somewhere to tell its story.
Today, it's considerably louder, more confident and more connected than it was then. The rest of Australia is paying attention, which is gratifying, although those of us who live here might reasonably wonder what took them so long.
Welcome to the tenth-anniversary edition of FNQ Food Magazine.
Have a read. Then go and eat something.
David Leith
Editor
