From the coast to the hinterland, the ever dynamic Gold Coast delivers big time on a grown-ups' getaway.
Less than two hours after landing at the Gold Coast Airport, we're in the Currumbin Valley testing our endurance in a wood-fired hot stone sauna. It's set beneath a magnificent Moreton Bay fig in the yard of a century-old farmhouse that is now, of all things, an outdoor bathhouse. The grounds of the restored Queenslander are the site of two saunas, a pool dense with Dead Sea minerals, a cedar hot tub and two hydrotherapy spa baths. You rotate your way through them, as many times as you like, sneaking an ice-cold plunge bath into the mix if you're brave enough. It's quite the wake-me-up after our early rise to catch our flight here. Then it's off to lunch at Pasture & Co, just next door. Along with The Bathhouse, it's part of a complex known as Ground at Currumbin, a collective of local businesses with "strong environmental and social values". The cafe is wildly popular and the queue to order lunch is long. The wait for the food, thankfully, is not, and I'm soon eating vegan zucchini and potato rosti, with beetroot hummus, avocado and a macadamia rosti.
It's a virtuous start to our mini-break on the Gold Coast, a place traditionally associated with more hedonistic pursuits. Now, it is making an art of seamlessly combining the two extremes, and so much more that's in between. Restaurants, bars, shopping, art, markets, walks, spas, adventures of every kind ... and always the theme parks, a rite-of-passage family-holiday institution. And always, always, the beach. No wonder the Gold Coast labels itself Australia's favourite playground. It is as though it exists to please the entire country. Something for everyone, at any age. The holiday capital of the people.
We're here for a grown-ups' vacation. We won't be going near the theme parks and we're not sticking to the beaches either; our itinerary is taking in the coast and the hinterland, two nights at each. They are so close to each other, yet so vastly different. In the hinterland, we stay and eat at places that have serious backstory, in between walking through ancient rainforests, tasting local wines, and dawdling along quaint high streets. On the coast, we dine at the sort of restaurants that are establishing the Gold Coast as a bona fide gastronomic destination, walk the beachfronts and take in some nightlife that is a blast of retro fun.
The coast is where we begin our sojourn, in a new hotel on Broadbeach Island, site of The Star casino and a $2 billion masterplan to populate the 6.7-hectare patch of land with five luxury hotels. The Dorsett Gold Coast opened in the final days of 2021, the colour palette of its rooms reflecting the beach and the hinterland and even the hues of sunrise and sunset in dusty pink feature walls. It's an international hotel chain that, although headquartered in Hong Kong, is paying attention to its location. You might say it's new Gold Coast - still gleaming, yet elegant; part of a next, less ostentatious chapter marked symbolically by the approaching retreat of Palazzo Versace - a bastion for 25 years of Euro-style glitz that had found its logical Aussie home on the Gold Coast, until the Italian fashion house withdrew from the branding agreement with the hotel last month.
We dine across the Gold Coast Highway from Broadbeach Island, at the cavernous and moodily lit Miss Moneypenny's, where Mediterranean meets Asian meets lots of local produce on a seafood-heavy menu (although there's plenty of red meat and poultry as well - like wagyu beef rump cap and crisp-skin whole duck). If you like, you can lash out on some white sturgeon caviar - $80 for 10 grams - or a half-kilo of Alaskan crab for $150.
Fizzy beach-club tunes blasting in the background, we eat yellow fin tuna tartare on warm crostini, and the restaurant's signature (no wonder, it's divine) prawn toast with yuzu soy and Korean chilli paste. From our corner blue-velvet banquette, we look out across Surf Parade to a classic 1960s-era, two-level block of five small apartments, now dwarfed by high-rise buildings. It reminds me of the famous children's book, The Little House, where an expanding city eventually surrounds a country cottage. The Gold Coast might be in a constant state of reinvention, but the modest, low-slung flats, in the thick of the Broadbeach action, suggest that it doesn't completely bury its past.
Our visit to the Pink Flamingo Spiegelclub is a case in point. It opened only in 2019, but channels that glitz for which the Gold Coast has been famously known. We're greeted outside by a young woman dressed head-to-hot-pants in pink, including a gold-trimmed pillbox hat; inside, waitresses in sequinned flapper-style costumes deliver complimentary champagne in vintage-style glasses to our neon-lit table. The art deco vibes are in overdrive. I feel like we've come here in a time machine. And so the show begins - a dazzling and polished spectacle of song, dance and watch-through-your-fingers acrobatics, with a cheeky MC in a bad wig and coat tails making lots of bawdy jokes.
Our first day has been bookended with thoughtful wellness and outrageously fun decadence. Welcome to the Gold Coast 2023.
On Tamborine Mountain
At The Polish Place on Tamborine Mountain, less than an hour's drive from Surfers Paradise, waitresses with flower garlands in their hair walk by us bearing plates of salmon in lemon sauce and pork hock baked with beer. Some are delivered to tables we can't see, tucked around corners in a meandering garden with one of the most epic views I've ever seen. It goes on forever in three directions, the Great Dividing Range looming far away to the west.
It's lunchtime, and we opt for pierogi (traditional Polish dumplings) with sauerkraut and porcini mushroom, and placki ziemniaczane (potato pancakes) with sour cream. Bypassing the option of trying one of nearly 50 Polish vodkas on the menu, I instead have a glass of chardonnay made just up the road at Witches Falls winery, where we head to after lunch for a wine-tasting at their gorgeous cellar door.
The Polish Place is an icon in these parts. Established in the early 1980s by Polish-born Ania Sowter and her Australian husband Phil, and building a reputation for traditional homemade Polish cuisine in its spectacular escarpment-edge location, the restaurant burned down on New Year's Eve in 2016.
Shattered yet unbowed, the Sowters rebuilt and reopened in September 2019, just months before COVID-19 struck. But they have endured. On this weekday lunchtime the place is buzzing. "We're still here, and still enjoying it," says the elegant Ania. She and her husband have joined us for dessert - apricot cake, Phil's favourite. Made on the premises, of course.
That night, our third on the Goldie, it's almost a relief to be cooking our own dinner after a few days of food overload. The ingredients for a salad and steak Farm to Fork dinner have been left for us in the fridge of our forest lodge. We are staying at Cedar Creek Lodges, which sits within ThunderBird Park, an "adventure playground" whose beginnings go back 80 years, rambling across 112 hectares at the edge of Tamborine National Park on the world's largest deposit of the geological marvels known as thundereggs.
Judi Minnikin took over running the park more than 20 years ago, and the offerings since have proliferated as she and husband Bob have transformed it. There is so much going on, it makes my head spin. You can fossick for thundereggs; pan for crystals; stay in beautifully appointed glamping tents; bring your own tent and set up camp; play laser skirmish in the rainforest; play mini-golf; ride a zipline through the treetops; dine at the Rainforest Restaurant (we have a full buffet breakfast there); and have a drink at the Lounge Bar, which doubles as a gallery space. You can even get married. There are about 200 weddings here every year.
Our two-bedroom fully self-contained forest lodge has been newly renovated and it's lovely and super comfortable - our bed is furnished with nearly a dozen cushions. The hot water bottle covers in our bedroom point to how cold it gets up on the mountain. The coast might be a year-round sun-and-sand destination, but the hinterland is a place to get cosy in winter months. Rug up, have some adventures and wind up the day in front of a roaring fireplace.
Into the rainforest
On the drive south towards O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat, road signs in red shout warnings: "Take extreme care. Very narrow winding road." And so it is, sometimes precipitously. Lamington National Park Road twists and curls and switches back on itself in extreme fashion. On the map, it looks like cooked spaghetti thrown at a wall. No wonder it took two days to reach the retreat in its early days more than a century ago, when the O'Reilly family began welcoming visitors to their wild and green idyll on the Lamington plateau.
Today, a gamut of accommodation from campsites and powered safari tents to luxury three-bedroom villas is available to nature-lovers who want to immerse themselves in the rainforest. There are many walking tracks to take yourself on, but a daily discovery program is packed with activities, too, from 4WD and e-bike tours to guided walks and wildlife encounters. Every day begins with an early-morning bird walk and ends with a tour to the glow worm grotto, where millions of the tiny larvae illuminate a cliff-face like a starry night sky. The two signature tours have been going for 96 years, guide Nathan Wilshaw tells us - through Depression, war, fire, flood and pandemic.
Soon after our afternoon arrival, Nathan leads us on the Booyong Walk. It starts opposite reception and is only 800 metres long, but a lot happens along the way - much of which we'd miss without a guide, including the birds that recognise Nathan's voice, he says, and come out to have a peck at crumbled walnuts in our hands: first a white-browed scrubwren and then Mr Whippy the eastern whipbird, who charms with his fetching mohawk and twitchiness, "like he's had one too many espressos", says Nathan. Bruce the brush turkey is meanwhile strutting around, but the star of the show is a more mysterious type, a satin bowerbird known as the Undertaker (it's a long story), whose glossy blue plumage we glimpse in the treetops, and whose lair of scavenged blue items, part of the birds' elaborate mating ritual, is visible in a clearing off the pathway.
We come to the rainforest treetop walkway, the world's first when its initial section was built in 1986. There are nine suspension bridges and an eyrie for humans - we climb ladders up into the canopy that take us a harrowing 30 metres above the ground.
As the sun drops in the sky and the rainforest begins to darken, Nathan gently pries open trap doors in a bank of earth along part of the track, to see if the deadly spiders that live within might make a brief cameo (eek). He points out plants like the gympie-gympie stinging tree, whose leaves are covered in silica hairs that inflict utter agony on humans. In much cheerier news, we make a rare sighting of an angle-headed dragon. It stays very still, camouflaged against a rock, and stares.
Back to the beach
Less than 24 hours later, we are the ones doing the staring, at surfers who appear almost close enough to drop in on our lunch. The Tropic bar and restaurant is directly on the beach in the Burleigh Heads pavilion, and from our table on the terrace, all that's visible looking seaward are the waves, the waxheads and the blue sky.
The serenity of the rainforest and the sweeping view over mountain ranges we looked out upon just this morning, from the deck of our O'Reilly's villa, feel far away in more ways than one. The Tropic at Sunday lunchtime is pumping with contagious energy; it's loud and busy, the tunes are funky, and the kitchen wastes no time delivering its Mediterranean and modern Australian dishes to tables of exuberant diners catching up with friends and family on a glorious sunny day. We choose the fresh prawns, kingfish tartare, puffed spice bread and taramasalata, and burrata dressed in olive oil with a delicious pistachio something-something.
It's the perfect last hurrah before we head to the airport. From the beach to the hinterland, the blue to the green, we've loved this Gold Coast of 2023.
Sarah Maguire was a guest of Destination Gold Coast
POP! GOES THE MENU
Art meets gastronomy at a very long lunch, writes Sarah Maguire
At Palette restaurant, on the ground floor of the Gold Coast's Home of the Arts (HOTA), menus are inspired by the exhibitions that cycle through the main gallery - and right now, it's a world-exclusive pop art exhibition featuring works from the likes of Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. That's why our dessert, Chocolate Explosion, has a white-chocolate, pop art-inspired top that says "Boom!". It's soon obscured by vaporous nitro-poached chocolate mousse spooned on top by the waiter, before we crack on through to discover another half-dozen chocolate textures hiding beneath.
By this point of the proceedings, belts have been well and truly loosened. We've made our way through a seven-course tasting menu - even more, if you count the five morsels that make up the "snacks" course right at the beginning of this hours-long experience. "It's a marathon, not a sprint; you have to pace yourselves," our waiter has thoughtfully advised.
Among the "snacks" is a crunchy South American bunuelos fritter, a Korean-inspired stuffed chicken wing and, the table favourite, smoked paperbark ice-cream with yuzu oil and a garnish of trout roe - a burst of sweetness and saltiness before the main business begins. The charcoal sourdough from local Burleigh Baker comes with the world's most delicious butter (seriously), made in-house with miso fermented for 96 months.
At the helm of this dining epic is executive chef Dayan Hartill-Law, who brings a Japanese flavour palate to Palette, direct from the celebrated Quay restaurant in Sydney where he spent two of his most formative years. "Being able to traverse that umami palette, then pairing it with bitter or salty or sweet; I am just comfortable there," he tells us. The kitchen has a "pretty massive" fermentation program, making its own soys, misos and vinegars. Hartill-Law also draws heavily on local produce and native ingredients - some of them, such as paperbark and midyim berries, foraged from the grounds of HOTA itself.
We eat a collection of little "sea wonders", from scallop with green tea jelly to farmed groper with black garlic, followed by Hervey Bay cuttlefish with chawanmushi - a Japanese egg custard - and yuzu caviar; it's one of Palette's most popular dishes and my pick of the day. Then it's on to kangaroo braised in a mole (sauce) made of 65 ingredients, eaten with crisp pancake and a quandong and riberry jam; and finally, in a big nod to the Aussie meat pie: duck in smoked cheddar pastry with Davidson plum sauce.
We'd planned to visit the gallery but by the time the feasting is over, it's about to close for the day. We figure that's ok. In the gastronomic sense at least, we've had our fill of art already.
Palette's tasting menu is $135 a head, with wine pairing an additional $75. See paletterestaurant.com.au. Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York, is on at HOTA in Surfers Paradise until June 4.
TRIP NOTES
Getting there: Virgin, Rex, Jetstar and Qantas all fly direct to the Gold Coast from Sydney and Melbourne. Virgin and Jetstar fly direct from Canberra.
Staying there: At Cedar Creek Lodges a two-bedroom self-contained lodge is $459 a night for up to four people, minimum two-night stay; glamping tents from $349 a night. See cedarcreeklodges.com.au. At O'Reilly's Rainforest Retreat, safari tents start at $105 a night, guesthouse rooms at $215 and luxury villas, set into a hillside, from $415. See oreillys.com.au
At Broadbeach, rates at the Dorsett Gold Coast start from about $229 on weeknights. See dorsetthotels.com. In Surfers Paradise, the five-star JW Marriott Gold Coast Resort and Spa is recently refurbished and great for families with its saltwater lagoons and freshwater pool. Rooms from about $538 a night. See marriott.com
Explore more: destinationgoldcoast.com