The Bunyip Hotel, Cavendish: a food lovers' oasis in country Victoria

It's a Thursday afternoon and farmers in work boots are bringing boxes of their produce into the old Cavendish pub. It's a classic wool-boom boozer with an Art Deco facade hiding the bones of an old hotel that dates back to the 1800s.

It's in the middle of nowhere, half an hour north of Hamilton, an hour south of Horsham, and 40 kilometres as the crow flies across the Grampians to the multi-hatted Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld.

It is now home to chef James "Jimmy" Campbell. He's a local boy. His footy photo with the 2015 premiership Cavendish footy team hangs in the public bar.

The Bunyip is now a destination for hard-core foodies who want to try Campbell's new style of cuisine, which has been described as "modern squattocracy". For here he takes classic Victorian country cooking and polishes it up to the same fine-dining standard as when he won two Good Food Guide hats as head chef of MoVida Sydney.

Campbell was one of the MoVida group's hottest chefs. He learned from chef Frank Camorra how to take simple rustic Spanish dishes and refine them into something both delicious and beautiful. "Frank was able to express his cultural background through his cooking," explains Campbell as a box of incredibly small but wonderfully plump chickens are dropped off by farmer Kate Mibus.

"That is what I am trying to do here. I want to serve the food I grew up with. Like the golden syrup dumplings. That's my gran's recipe. Take that recipe and apply the techniques I have learned to present something that everyone in the Western District will recognise but someone with a fine palate will also appreciate."

I want to serve the food I grew up with.

Before returning to his hometown, Campbell was at the top of his game taking accolades from critics and accepting trophies at awards nights. He was also burning the candle at both ends, playing hard after work and on days off. "I was a real mess," admits Campbell. His life in Sydney fell apart and his family gathered around him to put him back together.

He returned to the farm where he grew up, where his loving stepmother and father still live. He worked hard on the farm. Crutching sheep. Fencing. Shearing. The family farm is a beautiful place. His home looks out over rich pasture to the peaks of the Southern Grampians. His family have been here so long they have roads named after them.

In early 2017 he took over the kitchen of the Bunyip Hotel, in Cavendish. Chicken parmies and burgers were scrubbed off the menu and in came solid Western District cooking. Corned beef. Wonderful corned beef bright with spices and juicy to the tooth. "It was always served with cabbage when we were growing up," explains Campbell, "but I have a thing for kimchi and so I made my own and serve it with the beef." It is sensational.

Black pudding is a classic country breakfast dish and Campbell's version touches on the Spanish morcilla, but is perhaps even better with great cubes of silky white pork fat in a mousse-like blood pudding served on a bed of freekeh – smoked green wheat – enriched with pheasant jus.

When Campbell first moved into the Bunyip Hotel, he shared it with Bunyip Brewing Co. and Cavendish Gin. Then they moved to a new site nearby and Campbell took on the lease of the hotel himself. "We're in what people think is the middle of nowhere and we have this great brewery and distillery [nearby]," he says. "It doesn't get more local produce than this."

He's closing until February 23 to renovate the hotel, putting in a deck and building a wood-fired oven from local bricks in which to roast whole lambs and pigs and great joints of beef from local farmers.

More produce comes into the kitchen. Caravan eggs from pastured hens protected by maremma sheepdogs. Organic vegetables grown on the banks of the Wannon River further downstream.

Campbell checks the bookings. There are 24 booked into the 100-seat dining room, with its random sloping floors and bowls club decor. On every table is a small vase of big, fragrant old-fashioned roses, picked by his cousin from the roses his great-grandmother planted.

The word has got out that there are a few people in town tonight and by 7pm the numbers swell to 90. It doesn't faze Campbell. He knows everyone in town. He went to school with most of them and his aunt is the teacher. Delivering meals is hard because none of the locals stay at their tables. They get up and talk to people around the room. Some people are dining outside, the setting sun flooding the red gum forest lining the Wannon River, 50 metres from the dining room, with the last of the day's golden light.

Out go the meals. One of the starters is a dish of egg and chips. It is deceptively delicious. Koroit potatoes that are soft, sweet and earthy, fried so the sugars caramelise. Seasoned with salt and dusted with paprika they are finished with two fried Caravan eggs that are crisp on top thanks to a jet of flame from a propane gas bottle.

Throughout the night there is a sense of hospitality and community in the room that comes from a true desire to look after other people's sense of happiness.

After the guests have gone Campbell and his apprentice Lachlan Price knock back diet colas and go over the successes and stumbles of service. Price gingerly pulls a cookbook from his bag. It's his grandmother's. It dates back to the 1930s. Campbell goes through it, picking out favourites.

A few days prior he entered a sponge cake into the annual Cavendish Fleece and Floral Show. This is a fair where the blokes enter wool and the women show off their baking. Eyebrows were raised when he showed up with a cake. Even more when he took out second prize in this hotly contested competition.

"That took balls mate," says Price. "That took balls."

Bunyip Hotel, 17-25 Scott Street, Cavendish, 03 5574 2205. Open Thu-Sat noon-11pm, Sun noon-5pm. The Bunyip reopens February 23, 2018.