Agrarian Kitchen's much-loved Tasmanian cooking school to reopen, bigger and better

• The foodies guide to travelling in Tasmania

After an 18-month hiatus, Tasmania's high-profile Agrarian Kitchen Cooking School is set to reopen in a new home at the end of October.

The move from Lachlan to New Norfolk, a 35-minute drive from Hobart, has increased capacity from 10 students to 12, created space for demonstration classes, and provided a new kitchen garden to draw on.

Once open, it will also give owners Rodney Dunn and Severine Demanet some work-life balance. "The kitchen in our home was also the kitchen for the classes, and we never used it much for ourselves," says Demanet.

The new cooking school, now in the same building as Agrarian's restaurant and kiosk, is all high ceilings, Tasmanian oak carpentry, and top-of-the-line AEG steam ovens and induction cooktops. Adding a fireplace was a no-brainer, Dunn says, considering "fire is really the heart of what we do".

Cooking students (and the restaurant's chefs) will harvest ingredients from a 0.4-hectare walled garden just out the back. In the 1960s, when the site was a hospital, the area was used as an exercise yard. "Now, it's the best vegetable garden we could have imagined," Dunn says. "Every problem we've ever had, we've fixed."

A quarter of the space is dedicated to fruit and veg. There's also a greenhouse, a compost area and a biodiversity-boosting pond and meadow. The pair plan to run gardening classes as well as tours for restaurant and kiosk guests later in the year. "This will go so far beyond people's exceptions," Dunn says. "It'll blow your mind."

The cooking school officially reopens on October 29, with a program to be released mid-September.

Expect cheesemaking and fermenting workshops alongside whole-animal butchery classes. Dunn and Demanet will continue their tradition of hosting top chefs from interstate and overseas, but they're not quite ready to say who.

11A The Avenue, New Norfolk, theagrariankitchen.com