The Crooked Carrot

The Crooked Carrot is a produce-driven café on the Forrest Highway in Myalup, serving fabulous coffee, amazing slices, cakes and sweet treats, and freshly cooked breakfast and lunch.

The café offers casual dining in a setting surrounded by farmland with an enormous nature playground and lawned areas, vintage tractors, vintage trucks, two vintage Melbourne trams and even an aeroplane on display in the gardens. It’s a perfect stop, especially if travelling with kids or pets.

It boasts a fantastic range of sweet treats made in-house daily and a wide range of gluten-free treats, too. It stocks gourmet local products such as jams, pickles, honey, and dried fruit.

You will also find an in-house florist with beautiful fresh flowers from a flower fridge available daily and a wide range of homewares and gifts, pots, and plants.

History

Originally from a farm in Donnybrook, Joe Castro purchased the Myalup property in 1990. Soon after, he married Sonia, whose parents were farmers in Slovenia before running a 5-acre market garden in Perth.​

In 1996, they purchased an adjacent emu-farm property from the Marshalls, which had a small café near the highway.

The Castros agreed to lease the famous Myalup road stop to the Marshall family, who continued to run it for two decades, supplying residents and travellers with their quintessentially Aussie emu pies, along with some local produce and fresh-squeezed orange juice straight from the orchards in nearby Harvey.​

Once the lease expired in June 2015, Sonia started dreaming up an idea for a small produce-driven café that provided a unique food offering compared to nearby service stations. A chance meeting with Kirk Foster, who would become the first café manager, and a chef recommendation from friends drove the project from dream to reality.

With her gift for design, Sonia transformed the simple farm stand into a small café, which opened its doors in 2015. An avid vintage collector, she decorated the café interior with quirky bits and pieces from her shed full of old things: tractor seats became bar stools, rusty buckets served as bathroom sinks, and watering cans became overhead lighting. She enlisted Joe and a few farmhands to haul their collection of old farm tractors and line them up along the back fence where they stood as a picturesque foreground to their adjacent fields.​

It didn’t take long for the highway café to gain a robust notoriety—and it continues to grow today.