Budget
Kimberley Asian Cuisine Restaurant
Taking an influence from a mixed bag of Asian cuisines, their menu is a welcome variance in your dining options. The Asian-style dishes are not particularly authentic, but are nonetheless spicy in the right way.
Rumours Patisserie
Despite the fancy name, Rumours is more of a sandwiches and pies place that does a decent fry up breakfast that is a popular hangover cure. Freshly made burgers are of a hunger busting size and the cakes, slices and muffins taste like something your mum used to make. Avoid going there after 3PM, when school children descend like a flock of crows to eat the last sausage roll in the warmer.
Good budget food is hard to find. If the fast food chains don't appeal, you may be better off heading to a supermarket and eating DIY.
BP Ord River Roadhouse
You may be asking how food from a petrol station could possibly be worth eating, but this place has decent home-made take away food that's consistently raved about by visitors and locals alike. If burgers and pies are too ignoble for your tastes, try some lasagne or beef stroganoff.
Midrange
The Durack Room Steakhouse/Sails Bar & Bistro
These two restaurants operate at different times of the year from the same property. Carnivores will feel right at home at the steakhouse with an animal heavy menu and a decor that feels like you're in someone's lounge room. Sails has a large outdoor dining area and offers pretty standard breakfast, lunch and dinner fare. Steakhouse open Mar-Dec, Sails open May-Sep.
Zebra Rock Bar & Restaurant
Keeping an Aussie theme right through to the menu, they serve up simple pasta, steak and seafood dishes, plus some genuine vegetarian options. Breakfast buffet and limited lunch dining are available on weekdays, but for a truly Australian feed, get to the $20 BBQ on Sundays.
Top end
Kelly's Bar and Grill
Popular with locals trying hard to emulate sophisticated city folk, the restaurant's cramped indoor seating area forces most diners to the tables on the spacious deck outside. The menu changes with the seasons and features local produce. The choices can be variable interestingness wise, but it's worth ignoring the usual run of the mill dishes and trying out a unique local style meal such barramundi and crocodile risotto. They also have a decent selection of wine and fancy beer.
Pumphouse Restaurant + Bar
Recently opened in a decommissioned pumphouse built in early days of the Ord River irrigation scheme. This stylish place overlooks the Ord River and serves modern Australian dishes made with produce from all over the Kimberley and WA. If the reverberant seating inside the cavernous space dampens your appetite, a table on the riverside deck makes a nice place to simply have a beer and watch the crocs swim past.
The Argyle Room/The Grande Bistro
An upmarket place that offers fine dining in the Argyle room and more casual bistro eats out in the courtyard. The menu, albeit limited, is spoken of by many in the same favourable terms as the service. Offering among the usual modern Australian dishes, a buffet, daily specials of local produce and wood fired pizzas. The buffet breakfast can be hit and miss â some days, you may get fresh pancakes and hot food and on others, a loaf of bread and a toaster.
Kununurra's isolation and distance from the capital cities haven't stopped it from having some pretty decent dining options. Most of the better eating is found at hotel restaurants where menus feature modern Australian cuisine, usually with a Kimberley style twist. Dishes made with crocodile, kangaroo and barramundi are prominent menu items and the odd bush tucker ingredient, such as boab chutney, might also make it onto the plate.
Kununurra is surrounded by agriculture, so there's a steady supply of fresh, sometimes organic, vegetables and fruit throughout the year. The popular Kensington Pride mangos come into season between September and December and are prized for their unique flavour.
There was a time when farms sold their produce from rickety wooden tables in front of their properties. Sadly, this doesn't seem to happen much nowadays. If you still like the idea of buying your food directly from the farmer, it might be worth driving around the farmlands on the towns outskirts and keeping an eye out for a hand painted sign propped up against a fence.
Those with a more adventurous palate should try a Boab Nut. Boab trees start to fruit in October and reach maturity around mid-January when the mature nut drops to the ground. The nuts are generally too high up to pick from a branch, so you will need to search for an intact one among the litter of smashed shells left by birds. The flaky dry white flesh inside the thin shelled nut has been described by some as tasting like citrus flavoured powdered milk, but others maintain it's closer to sour Styrofoam. The tuber of baby boabs are also edible and taste similar to a water chestnut. Bottles of boab chutney flavoured with various spices can sometimes be bought at the Saturday markets.