Woodhouse named among nation’s best

Owner and chef Paul Pitcher said he was surprised and chuffed to have made the shortlist.

"There's a lot of great restaurants around Australia and I suppose for us as a regional restaurant to be chosen was pretty special," he said.

Mr Pitcher said the restaurant's red gum chargrill and wood-fired pizza oven set it apart from many of the regions other eateries.

"There's a lot of good restaurants around Bendigo and the area but probably just our uniqueness of cooking with wood is what makes us maybe a little bit different to others in our region," he said.

"We have a wood-fired grill and we cook all our steaks on that so we buy in split red gum and we use that to cook all our meat and then we also have a wood-fired pizza oven.

"You can get a gas outlet (for it) but I never got it put in because I wanted to stick to our theme, so we cook completely with red gum.

"There's some great food in the area but I think that's our real point of difference."

The Woodhouse will host an evening of Wagyu, Wine and Wood on May 21 as part of the competition's dining program, which has already sold out.

"It sold out in four days, we were very surprised by that as well," Mr Pitcher said.

"We've chosen everything regional, all our produce and all our wines are regional to this area."

"We're using some full blood Wagyu eye fillet which costs me $100 a kilo and we've got some from the Sher family in Ballan, just outside of Daylesford," he said.

"We're also using Everything Wagyu which is from Cohuna and we use quite a bit of their Wagyu as well."

The chefs and restaurateurs at the shortlisted restaurants go on to vote for their ten personal favourites and the list is whittled down to find Australia's top 100 restaurants.

Mr Pitcher said his selection had been based on his own dining experiences.

"I picked the best restaurants that I've been to that were in that group ," he said.