Food & Drinks is an Australian recipe site with one rule: every dish comes with something to pour next to it.
We cook mostly at home, in kitchens that do not have six-burner cooktops, and we pour mostly on Friday nights, in glasses that do not match. The recipes are seasonal, the wines are Australian-first but globally curious, and the cocktails are chosen because they actually belong at dinner, not because a bar menu said they would.
Why this site exists
Because nobody else is doing it. Australian food media has a recipe section, then a wine column in a different tab, and a cocktail guide on a different website written by a bartender who doesn’t eat dinner. Food & Drinks is the place where those three conversations happen in the same room.
Every recipe tells you what to pour with it. Every bottle we recommend tells you what to cook beside it. Every seasonal guide shifts automatically with the Southern Hemisphere calendar, because you shouldn’t need to convert Northern Hemisphere recipes in your head when asparagus is cheapest in September and not April.
Who writes this
Scott Perry. Australian. Writer, builder, Friday-night cook, Saturday-afternoon griller, Sunday-morning second-pot-of-coffee type. Based in Melbourne.
Trained opinions on: Clare Valley Riesling, why you should never use bottled lime juice, which bottle shop in your suburb is actually the cheapest, and why tequila is the best dinner spirit in the country.
Untrained opinions on: approximately everything else.
The three promises we make
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Every recipe is tested at home, in a home kitchen. No professional test kitchens, no food stylists, no propane torches. If it works in a domestic oven with supermarket ingredients on a weeknight, it’s on the site. If it doesn’t, it isn’t.
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Every pairing is drinkable by humans. No “this recipe pairs with a 1982 Barossa Shiraz.” You can walk into any bottle shop in Australia and buy the things we recommend. The average first-pick bottle on the site is around $30. Nothing we recommend is unaffordable for a Friday dinner.
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Nothing here is sponsored in a way you wouldn’t know about. If we love a bottle, we’ll tell you. If a winery sent it to us, we’ll tell you that too. Our disclosure page lays out exactly what we do and don’t take.
What you won’t find
No wellness jargon. No “clean eating.” No 47-paragraph introductions before the recipe. No hacking of anything: not carbonara, not pavlovas, not relationships. No sponsored air-fryer deals. No meal plans. No affiliate links dressed up as recommendations. No pretending we know about French regions we’ve never been to.
The editorial calendar
We publish:
- New recipe, every week. Usually Monday.
- Seasonal pairing guide, every month, timed to what is actually on the shelves in Australia right now.
- Bottle of the week, every Friday. Short, specific, usually under $40.
- The Sunday Pour, our newsletter, every Sunday morning. One recipe, one pairing, one bottle worth buying.
What the site is built on
Australian ingredients, Australian seasonality, and the stubborn belief that an everyday home cook with half a bottle of wine in their hand can produce better dinners than most restaurants if they stop trying to show off.
Also: WordPress, a lot of testing, and what my wife describes as “an unhealthy amount of time thinking about where the comma goes in a pairing note.”
Get in touch
If you want to say hello, ask a recipe question, send us a bottle, or tell us we got something wrong, drop us a note.
We read everything. We respond to most things. We occasionally forget for three days, then remember at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Welcome to Food & Drinks. Pour something. Cook something. Pour something else.