Sarah Clare 

Sarah Clare grew up in the Huon Valley, in the small town of Cygnet on Tasmania's southern coast. One of nine children, she spent her early years fishing for mussels and oysters, picking wild mushrooms, and cooking alongside her father, a local potter whose crockery would later grace the tables of her own restaurant. That upbringing, steeped in the rhythms of a working landscape and the produce it yields, has shaped everything she has done since.

After years working in hospitality in Sydney and Melbourne, including time behind the bar at Melbourne's Murmur, Sarah appeared on MasterChef Australia in 2018 and returned for the Back to Win series in 2020. She was a compelling presence on both; her cooking grounded in place, her instincts deeply Tasmanian even when the format demanded otherwise.

Rather than parlay the exposure into a mainland career, she came home. Back in Cygnet, she spent time in the kitchen at Fat Pig Farm alongside Matthew Evans before launching Wild, a series of pop-up dinners built around beautifully sourced local ingredients. The pop-ups were a proving ground, and she went on to open ILHA, her own restaurant in Cygnet, where a menu of modern Australian cooking with South American inflections put Huon Valley produce at its centre.

Sarah now works at Harvest and Light in Geeveston, one of the Huon Valley's most distinctive addresses: a small-batch picklery, tasting house and gallery that sources and preserves the best of local seasonal fruit and vegetables, and showcases the full breadth of Tasmanian wine, cider, spirits and craft beer. It is exactly the kind of place Sarah was always heading toward; an operation built around provenance, craft and the quiet work of small producers. She continues to take on private events and pop-up dinners, where a five-course format with matched wines allows her to work with the ingredients and makers she knows best.

Sarah is also a trained sommelier, and the two disciplines inform each other. Her approach to wine is of a piece with her cooking: find the producer whose work you believe in, understand what they've made, and let that lead. She is a consistent and vocal advocate for the artisan growers, winemakers and makers who form the backbone of Tasmania's food culture, the people whose names rarely appear on menus but whose work makes the cooking possible.

That sense of place, and the people who tend it, is what drives her. Whether in a kitchen, at a long table for a private dinner, or pouring a Tasmanian pinot that most people haven't heard of, Sarah Clare is doing the same thing she was doing as a child on the southern coast: paying close attention to where food comes from, and making sure others do too.