This funky new bistro is a bit French, a bit somewhere else, and a whole lot of Newtown

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As most chefs will tell you, fat is where the flavour is. The craft of cooking isn’t just tweezering rare botanicals onto caviar, it’s controlling and manipulating animal, dairy and plant-based fats to create depth, richness, ooze and crispness.

French cuisine is bloody good at this, something that James Macdonald, executive chef for the Odd Culture group, has exploited at this new Frenchy in Newtown. Soft scrambled eggs are enriched with creme fraiche, and tagliatelle is tossed with foie gras. There are fries, of course, with a bavette steak, and even the crudite of raw and preserved vegetables has fromage blanc for swiping through.

It all has a rollicking Newtownian air, as you might expect from a group that includes the Odd Culture natural wine and wild beer bar downstairs, The Duke of Enmore, The Old Fitzroy and music venue Pleasure Club, the first bar to be granted a 4am licence in Newtown for more than 100 years.

The mezzanine restaurant is reminiscent of every French bistro ever.

The kitchen – broad and open, in the Scandinavian style – remains downstairs, helmed by head chef Jesse Warkentin, but the mezzanine restaurant has gone all dark and moody. With its shelf of wine bottles running around the walls, paper-over-cloth-covered tables set with taper candles, and strong Pierrot-inspired graphics on the wall, it’s reminiscent of every French bistro ever.

It’s great to see crazy French aperitifs such as Picon Biere, even if my young table server seems to think that it’s a dish on the menu. Here, the richly bitter orange-scented aperitif is mixed with Kronenbourg 1664 ($18), and tastes wonderfully like adult kombucha. Pastis Ricard, twanging with licorice, is a French holiday in a glass.

The menu makes it easy to share or say “go to hell with your sharing trends”, with an “Amuses” section that lists oysters and snacks, and a middle section titled Hors d’oeuvres. Starters include a finger of pissaladiere ($12 each) that’s all buttery onion confit and Olasagasti anchovy on buckwheat puff pastry.

Hors d’oeuvres are modest portions of steak tartare, riz au truffes (rice with truffles and reggiano), and a salade Lyonnaise ($24) that makes my heart beat faster with its promise of confit duck and bacon. Something magical happens when duck confit and slab bacon render their fat into a pan, only to be tossed through bitter frisee leaves and sent out with a nicely done poachy. It’s good and satisfying, although the duck and bacon feel aggressively crisped, and strangely, need to be fattier.

Two slabs of boudin noir terrine ($23) are served with a puddle of smooth pommes puree and caramelised apples, like a postcard dining’s past. Hello, 1970s! Nicely spiced, with a lilting sweetness from confit onion and blood, it’s a cracker.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve ordered a dish of pork and prunes, outside its spiritual home of the southwest of France, at least. But a cotelette de porc ($50) cleverly updates tradition; the Berkshire cutlet pan-fried, fringed with crisped fat and soft, fruity prunes. It sits in a pool of unashamedly unctuous sauce that gleams with the gelatinous skin of pig’s trotter.

By this stage, I’m expecting pommes duchesse, those soft, pappy, piped potatoes that came with all fine-dining aspirations in the ’70s. But no, it’s the lesser-known pommes de terre lorette ($16); the mashed spud mixed with choux dough and piped directly into hot oil, churros-style. Crisp yet yielding, they’re like soft tater tots.

Service is a bit rough-and-ready, but has character in its own casually democratic way. There may not be much polish, but there’s no formality either.

A Quebecoise pudding chomeur ($18), is just as easy-going with its maple syrup caramel soaking in to a cakey pudding, crowned with a smooth buttermilk ice-cream. It’s basically golden syrup dumplings in another form.

Like the rest of Bistro Grenier, it’s a bit of French, a bit of somewhere else, and a whole lot of Newtown.