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Celebrity chef Matt Moran comes to Canberra for Good Food Month 2016

Natasha Rudra

Matt Moran
Matt MoranJames Brickwood

Celebrity chef Matt Moran leads the charge of big name restaurateurs heading to the capital for the Canberra Times Good Food Month in March.

Moran will celebrate Good Food Month with a four-course garden party at Pialligo Estate on March 13.

Canberrans will also get the chance to have dinner at Aubergine with Ross Lusted, whose Bridge Room restaurant in Sydney has three chefs hats and was named Restaurant of the Year in the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide.

Sean McConnell, who runs Monster at Hotel Hotel, will team up with his chef brother Matt McConnell, who runs Bar Lourinha in Melbourne, for a long lunch.

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And the Enlighten Night Noodle Markets will return for the second year after bringing more than 150,000 Canberrans to the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in 2015.

The noodle markets will feature local Asian eateries Soi Noodle Bar, Thirst and Kusina while nitrogen ice cream outfit N2 Extreme Gelato will be back in a collaboration with much lauded Sydney bakery Black Star Pastry.

The markets and Good Food Month are run by Fairfax, the publisher of the Canberra Times.

Good Food Month runs through March with 31 food and wine related events over 31 days, including a Korean snack party collaboration between Temporada and hipster Korean joint Moon Park, from Sydney.

Other events include The Great Canberra Wine Dinner, featuring winemaker Bryan Martin; the launch of Japanese restaurant Lilotang's new Sake Bar in Barton, and a South American feast at Elk and Pea in Braddon with matched tequilas.

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Matt Moran's involvement is one of the more high profile events since Good Food Month expanded to Canberra.

Pialligo Farmhouse head chef Brendan Walsh said the opportunity to work with another chef was exciting and the focus of the event would be recipes from Moran's new cookbook Matt's Kitchen Garden.

Canberrans will also get a taste of some of Moran's signature dishes from his Sydney restaurant Chiswick.

"There's a huge diversity of fantastic food and wine in the Canberra region and I'm looking forward to coming down for a dinner as part of Good Food Month," Moran says.

"The local farmers and growers create some of the best produce in the country and I can't wait to have it showcased in my dishes."

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At Pialligo Estate, Walsh has access to perhaps one of the bigger kitchen gardens in the city - 68 luxuriant hectares of herb gardens, fruit orchards, veggie beds and more.

"That was the biggest lure for me to go to Pialligo from Melbourne," he says. "No restaurant in the centre of Melbourne has something like that. Not 68 hectares."

Good Food Month runs throughout March. The night noodle markets run from March 4-13 at Reconciliation Place. See canberra.goodfoodmonth.com

Default avatarNatasha Rudra is an online editor at The Australian Financial Review based in London. She was the life and entertainment editor at The Canberra Times.

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