Sarah Baldwin is teaming up with friend and gun sommelier Olivia Evans to help shine a light on one of the city’s most vital specialist producers.June 22, 2026Want to experience Sarah Baldwin’s cooking but can never land a seat at Joy, her tiny Fortitude Valley restaurant that’s one of the hottest dining tickets in town?Well, in early August Baldwin is cooking in a completely different environment, swapping the 10 seats and dining counter of Joy for a bucolic urban farm deep in the western suburbs when she presents Neighbourhood Feast with sommelier Olivia Evans.Oliva Evans and Sarah Baldwin.Matt SheaIt’s a chance to catch the chef working her magic in a completely different environment, and for Baldwin herself to explore a different style of cooking, channelled through the produce of Neighbourhood Farm in Oxley, a key specialist grower and supplier to a bunch of high-profile Brisbane restaurants.“I don’t have to be accountable to the standards of what Joy guests are used to,” she says. “For this event I can just be like: that’s yummy, and it looks beautiful, and it was grown right there. That’s all I need to think about.”Neighbourhood Feast will run over two four-course lunches on Sunday, August 2 and Monday, August 3. There are 50 seats available each day. The Monday is angled as a hospitality day, but Baldwin and Evans say anyone is welcome. Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox.Sign upBaldwin is in the early stages of drafting her menu (don’t be surprised if it changes, basically) but is currently toying with the idea of a pastry with laminated greens, dolmades using leaves from the farm, and a braised protein for mains.“And then lots of salads and vegetables, share style … I’ll make some bread,” she says. “And then for dessert it will be … some sort of marmalade, some sort of meringue – something citrusy, basically, I think.”Alongside the food, Evans intends to present a selection of mainly Australian wines.“My mind always goes to the best wine for the dish, but knowing what’s going on in the wine industry at the moment. People are really needing to be supported,” Evans says. “If I set that as the parameter, there are so many beautiful stories to be told.“With any wine I work with, it’s always erring on the side of the natural spectrum, organic and biodynamically grown fruit with minimal inputs. That’s been my jam for a very long time. And that time of the year, the farm will producing a lot of root vegetables and bitter leaves. And skin contact wines and root vegetables are a favourite style of pairing for me.” “For this event I can just be like: that’s yummy, and it looks beautiful, and it was grown right there. That’s all I need to think about.”Joy owner Sarah Baldwin.The setting should account for the rest of the magic. Neighbourhood Farm is in Oxley, in Brisbane’s south-west, in one of those quiet, bucolic pockets near the river that the city’s suburban sprawl has somehow managed to bypass. On the property are clutch of enormous trees, a series of shade houses, and then, out in the open, rows upon rows of produce in various stages of maturation.Over one fence is a paddock with a few horses nuzzling about. Over the other lies the river, obscured by trees but barely more than a stone’s throw away.Its proximity to the river nearly ended Neighbourhood Farm, with the whole operation going underwater during the 2022 “rain bomb” floods, leading to an estimated loss of $40,000 worth of seedlings, crops and equipment. It was temporarily shut down in late 2023.Both Baldwin and Evans have a long connection to the farm – Baldwin via ordering its produce for Joy, on and off, and Evans used to buy a weekly farm box when she first moved to town from the Northern Rivers. Evans has already hosted a lunch on the property, and Neighbourhood Feast is intended as another way of supporting the farm and its operator, Matt Bakker, who will host tours of the property as part of the lunch.“We’ve a handful of these styles of farmers – they’re really important – so I thought, ‘How do we support Matt without buying food from him?’” Evans says. “And I was, like, ‘Well, if we host an event here and you charge a venue fee, then it’s like money on top of what you already do. All you need to do is welcome us onto the property – you don’t have to do anything additionally to what you already do, because you already do so much.’“That was my main reason for doing it outside of it being an amazing experience for guests.”Tickets for Neighbourhood Feast are available via the Joy website.Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.From our partners