The must-visit restaurants in Port Douglas revealed
From farm-to-table Thai to fairy-lit mango trees and Coral Sea vistas, Port Douglas has award-winning dining and plenty of tropical charm on the side.
2 min
Ask any regular visitor to the Far North Queensland holiday town of Port Douglas for advice on eating out, and they’ll likely tell you to book your restaurants when you book your flights.
During peak times such as Christmas and the winter holiday season, it’s notoriously hard to secure a table unless you strike it lucky with a cancellation or know the chef.
The Australian Good Food Guide’s Chef Hat awards use a points-based system to honour restaurants with one, two or three hats, a respected marker in the absence of Michelin stars.
In Port Douglas, six restaurants appear in the 2025 Guide, four of them within a short stroll of one another.
Not bad for a small tropical outpost with a permanent population of just 3650.
And yes, you can still wear thongs. (Your good thongs, obviously.)
Jungle Fowl
This colourful venue serves modern, Thai-inspired, farm-to-table cuisine and has this year won restaurateurs Rachael Boon and Ben Wallace their third consecutive Chef Hat award.
There’s a strong emphasis on local produce, with most ingredients grown on their four-acre farm at Oak Beach, where chickens (jungle fowl) roam among the lemongrass, galangal and betel leaf.
Expect prawn betel leaf as part of the Seasonal Thai Banquet, alongside chilli squid salad and black pepper Angus beef.
Harrisons
The flagship restaurant at the Sheraton Grand Mirage is helmed by Chef Spencer Patrick, who trained under Marco Pierre White.
It is billed as Port Douglas’s most nationally awarded restaurant. The setting is old-world glamour with chandeliers, gilded busts and lagoon views; the cuisine contemporary.
Australian with reimagined English classics infused with North Queensland flavours. The set menu tells this story through line-caught chargrilled squid, baked oysters and duck fat Brussels sprouts.
Osprey’s
Located at a resort about ten minutes south of town, Osprey’s is perched in the treetops with views of rainforest-clad mountains and the sparkling Coral Sea.
Chef Krisztian Borbas presents a seasonal menu inspired by the tropics, featuring Moreton Bay bug with vanilla butter, spicy duck leg with red curry and slow-roasted pork belly with fried scallop wontons.
Melaleuca
Opposite the picturesque St Mary’s by the Sea, this open-air eatery is run by English-born chef Adam Ion and his Korean-born wife, Namhee.
The modern Australian menu, with clear Asian influences, features soft-shell mudcrab with green pawpaw Thai salad, and pan-seared Daintree barramundi for seafood lovers; flame-grilled beef tataki and slow-braised beef cheek for meat-eaters.
With its deck built around the trunk of a fairy-lit mango tree, it’s one of Port’s prettiest dining spots.
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Apple’s first foldable, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, combines an iPhone and iPad Mini experience—but its size, weight and price come with compromises.
4 min
As I watched a Netflix show on Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, I had two surprising thoughts.
The first: Maybe I don’t need my iPad Mini anymore.
The second: Uh oh, am I about to spend $1,999 on a phone?
I didn’t think folding phones were for me. I’ve been testing Android versions from Samsung and Google since 2019, and those early editions came with too much screen and too many compromises.
Fast forward seven years, and the technology has come a long way. Apple—in its very Apple way—has also come up with some hardware and software trickery to make up for some shortcomings of the basic design. My desire for a folding phone before today was zero. After today, it’s a lot more than zero.
I’m not ready to recommend the Duo, which ships on Oct. 23, just yet. Not until I am able to test it more fully, so be on the lookout for that review in a few weeks. But from what I experienced at Apple Park on Wednesday, I could actually picture myself using this new half-phone, half-tablet hybrid.
Crease camouflage
For months, I’ve been using Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8, a similarly squat, passport-shaped foldable that opens up to a larger screen. It’s impressively thin and can easily fit into the infuriatingly tiny pockets in women’s pants and dresses. Samsung did a lot of work to minimize the crease—the dip between the two halves of the big interior display—but it’s still clearly there.
When I held the iPhone Duo open, the crease was barely visible. As I slid my finger across the display, I could feel it, but it’s more subtle than Samsung’s. Most of the time, the screen looked as flat and smooth as the one on an iPad.
Apple employed both software and hardware techniques to camouflage the crease. The matte surface of the interior 7.6-inch screen minimizes reflections to hide it. (Samsung’s Fold 8 screen is shiny.)
And as you begin to open or close the iPhone Duo, the interface shifts the controls and content away from the center crease. If, say, you’re watching a video on the outer screen, you can open the Duo to switch to the bigger display within. A black fade marks the transition. You don’t see the video full screen until the phone is completely flat.
Heavy handed
My second observation was that, when the Duo is closed, in phone mode, it was harder to use one-handed than I expected.
In the keynote trailer and press release, Apple touted how thin the Duo is. It’s marketed as the thinnest iPhone ever—when open.
But it’s actually thicker and heavier than most of its Android competitors. The Duo weighs 254 grams, and is 11.3 millimeters thick when closed. The Samsung Galaxy Fold 8 is just 201 grams, with a thickness of 9.7 millimeters. Google’s Pixel 11 Pro Fold is 239 grams and 10.1 millimeters.
Because the Duo is also wider than a standard iPhone, I found it quite a challenge to type.
I admit, I do have smaller-than-average hands. So I consulted my colleague Rolfe Winkler, who has a larger grip. He agreed the Duo feels big.
Apple rearranged the interface on the outer screen so it looks different than traditional iPhones. The dock and control center are off to the right to be more reachable. Committing to the Duo as your main device will require adjustments in your handling. You will have to learn a new way to use and type.
Work and play
My most surprising takeaway? I feel a pull toward this device.
I always thought that combining an iPhone and an iPad would mean bigger compromises. The battery life is about the same as the 18 Pro (up to 24 hours of “regular use” on a single charge), though I’ll need to verify that in my real-world testing. And it’s also as durable, with the same IP68 dust- and water-resistance rating as the rest of the iPhone lineup.
There are trade-offs, for sure. Trying out the camera, I immediately missed the 8X zoom in my Pro model. The Duo has just 2X zoom, which wouldn’t cut it for the dozens of pictures I take of my kid every day.
But the dual screens unlock new photo functionality. You can see what your shot looks like from the outside screen. As someone who has tried tirelessly to self-direct a family photo—or a spouse—I am very eager to try this out more.
Foldables, I initially thought, were for classic mobile-warrior jet-setter types, who never sit at a desk and are always on calls. For that crowd, the Duo can run two apps side-by-side.
Me, I’m more of a bed binge-watcher and ebook reader. That’s what my beloved iPad Mini is for.
Watching videos on the Duo is a nice experience—nice enough that you forget the screen is 0.7 inches smaller than the iPad Mini’s. The main screen is also a 4:3 aspect ratio. Very similar, by the way, to the IMAX edition of the Odyssey.
Because I wasn’t able to snag a ticket to one of the sold-out screenings, I will be watching Christopher Nolan’s version of Homer’s epic on the Duo, just as the director intended. (Just kidding! Sort of.)
The Duo costs $800 more than an iPhone 18 Pro, and I’m not sure I want to spend that premium on a first-generation Apple device. But I’m not ruling out the idea that a Duo might one day be in my future. Stay tuned for my full review.
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