Editor’s note: As you may have noticed, zaf and amg are out of “jellyfish-for-breakfast” and “don’t drink the water” territory and have moved on to even less hospitable places — like the Australian outback, where you can drives for hundreds of miles without seeing another living person. Unless, of course, you know where to stop.
Like a mirage in the Australian outback desert, Fran’s Devonshire Tea House appears on the side of the Stuart Highway as you hit the town of Larrimah. It’s about 180km south of Katherine and about 500km north of Tennant Creek, the nearest towns of any size.
“Help yourself to tea and coffee,” Fran says when we arrive. It takes a minute to realize that the lady speaking to us is Fran and not hired help. In fact, there is no hired help. Fran’s Tea House seems to consist of Fran, several grandkids, and Fran’s daughter Michelle, who gets roped into doing some of the cooking, cleaning, money handling, and just about everything else.
Fran must be in her late 60s. She’s a matronly woman who spends her days cooking meat pies and scones to feed to travelers driving down the long road between Darwin and Alice Springs.
“I’ve just pulled a buffalo chili and cheese pie out of the oven.” says Fran. We are told, matter of fact, that we should have a pie and a scone so we could try both.
“And while you wait, you can get to know these nice folks,” prompts Fran.
These nice folks are Sue & Les, a retired couple spending two years caravanning around Australia. The back of their camper is emblazoned with “Buggawork” and “Sue & Les.” They’ve stopped in for a scone and a coffee at Fran’s on the recommendation of one of the guidebooks. Fran’s is, by now, in all the guidebooks.
“Is that the camel?” asks Sue when our meat pie arrives seconds later.
It isn’t, but it easily could be. Fran sells camel, buffalo, beef and fruit pies; cornish pasties; scones; waffles; and sandwhiches.
The buffalo pie is fantastic. It’s a flaky pie crust filled with buffalo meat simmered in chili and covered in melted cheese. I briefly consider my chances of survival 200km from the nearest Internet connection (and my heart’s chances of surviving more of her pies) and flirt with asking Fran if I could move in and have her cook for me every day.
As we eat, Fran’s grandchildren run around the yard between the tea house and the various other buildings. One building must be the old police station, although we’re too enthralled with the pie and scone to explore any further.
“There’s no drugs, no swearing around the kids out here,” Fran says. Fran’s grandkids study via a correspondence school.
We’re some of Fran’s earlier guests, having arrived at about 9 in the morning. Based on the number of pies Fran has cooked up, she’ll get a steady stream of hungry visitors well into the early evening when traffic on the highway dies down and Larrimah is returned to its proper residents.
Larrimah’s official population is 20. It’s unofficial population, best I can tell, is Fran, her husband, her daughter, and her grandkids. There’s little else around beside’s the Tea House, but Fran’s is more than enough to warrant an entire township.
Located on the site of the Larrimah Old Police Station and Museum, Fran’s is the official tourist information from the area, beckoning cars off the highway with the generic blue and white “i” sign — the universal symbol for “tourist help” — and with even more appealing hand-written signs offering buffalo and beef pies, fresh pastries, and drinks. Larrimah is significantly much better known for Fran’s cooking than for anything else.
As we’re preparing to leave, we peak our heads into Fran’s kitchen, savoring the smell of freshly-baked meat pies, and ask Fran if we can take her picture. Her daughter, Michelle, grumbles, “I still have a hangover,” as she and her Mom pose before fresh racks of camel, buffalo, and beef pies.
Fran has been cooking for 33 years and running her Devonshire Tea House for the last 22. They talked about moving south at some point, but decided against it. “Where else can I have all this?” asks Fran.
Fran’s Devonshire Tea House | Larrimah, NT, Australia
(no street address necessary)

There are three ways of getting an extra star for your hotel’s rating, and only one of them involves nice facilities and good service. Of the remaining two, the only legal choice is to add on extra restaurants, pools, and other random-assed stuff ‘til the judges just cave in from embarrassment. It doesn’t matter if you’ve converted the janitor’s closet into a computer center by storing the fax machine there; that line in your brochure means an automatic extra star for you.
This seems to be the tact taken by the Alice Springs Crowne Plaza. Yes, it’s in the middle of the desert. Yes, it’s staffed by locals – and, yes, you don’t get much more local than the Australian outback. Yes, it has to truck all the food and materials 1500km. But Las Vegas has to do all that stuff too and somehow they seem to have gotten the hang of this crazy hotel thing without too much difficulty.
Zaf and Amg are driving down through Australia’s Northern Territory into the Red Center. Natural hazards include suicidal wallabies, local rodeos, rancid fish n’ chips, and if that wasn’t enough, a big-assed scary desert with rocks in. So when you’ve spent all day dodging road trains in an three year old Nissan Pulsar, filled with contraband produce and an underaged Swiss hitchhiker, you start hoping that Alice Springs means a return to civilization.
Well, it doesn’t, but we didn’t know that. We booked in at the four-star Crowne Plaza, shed our hitchhiker, and drove through town in search of the revered logo. It was constructed from corrugated aluminum, the kind familiar to us from the infrequent cattle-processing stations along the highway. Inside was a little nicer – definitely up to Econo-Lodge or Days’ Inn level.
The bloke at the desk was courteous, right up until he noticed that we’d booked through an online retailer. You could see his face go ‘Ohhh…’ as he made a few extra notes on the computer. The room contained a stained carpet, ripped wallpaper, bare mattresses, and a weird smell. The single forlorn picture on the wall subscribed to the ever popular ‘Art By the Pound’ school of design. And the lock on the balcony was broken, something you really care about when you’re on the ground floor in a town famous for its substance abuse and you’re traveling with a sizable amount of electronics. We waited about 45 minutes for them to decide on another room scruffy enough for us.
It was downhill from there. The maintenance guys next door decided to have a drilling competition. We were asked to close our door so they could chuck a huge mound of trash off the roof onto our balcony. At our Indian dinner they gave us the wrong bill… twice. The lunchtime salad contained shredded credit card; exhaustive investigation proved that it was, in fact, slices of fossilized parmesan.
Now, if I don’t check in once in a while, work is sure to realize that I’m not at my desk anymore. We’d booked because they claimed to have some sort of in-room internet. What did this mean? They offer a phone jack. Not a separate one, but the bloke at the desk gave us full permission to unplug the phone and use its cord to ‘try to dial up AOL or whatever’.
I appreciate that four stars is not actually that great. But there’s an important lesson in this for all the ‘Silver Pines Motor Lodge With Color TV’s of the world. That extra star doesn’t require anything but a spare pool and desperate clientele. Yep, we’re staying. Why? Because there’s nothing but rocks and dingoes from here to Adelaide – where I hear they have a Hyatt Regency.
zaf: yeah, this one isnt strictly about food, but we were getting too much good press.