Previous SlideNext Slide

Long live the great Australian bowls club. May it survive for generations to come. Let it never give way to the bulldozer, succumb to the value of its land, become the high-rise luxury apartments of tomorrow. Let it retain its vinyl-clad chairs, its affordable drinks, its sacred dagginess.

How can we preserve this great bastion of Australian social life? There’s probably more than one way (and plenty of clubs that are not in immediate need of saving). But take a look at what’s happening in Lorne and you get a sense of the amazing potential there is for these institutions to change ever so slightly and become even more vital to their communities.

Little Picket opened at the Lorne Bowls Club in the middle of last year, with chef Jo Barrett coming straight off her six-month stint at Future Food System, the experimental self-sustaining home and urban farm in Federation Square. Barrett is growing much of the produce used on the menu at a nearby 1.6-hectare farm, and also sourcing vegies from the community garden across the street.

The building and set-up are pure country charm – a weatherboard building fronting a bowls lawn with the room retaining its vinyl seating, beat-up piano in the corner and its sense of community. This extends to the service, too, which feels like dining with family.

Sitting in this room, eating this food, enjoying the view out over the bowls lawn and being taken care of by these people, you could only be in Australia.

I visited Little Picket early on and found a charming spot that didn’t quite seem to know what it was yet. Some of the food was great, but some of it was too close to passable but unexciting home cooking and I wondered if Barrett was dumbing down her dishes to fit the venue.

A few months later, the problem has disappeared entirely, with Barrett finding the right balance between comfort and quality. There’s not a lick of pretension on these hand-scrawled daily menus, just extremely fresh produce being put to their best uses.

You absolutely must start with a serving of potato bread ($10), a soft, pillowy dream that comes dripping in roast garlic and parsley butter. Pair it with the house-made halloumi ($18) topped with pickled lemon and chives, a thing of true beauty that manages to be creamy, bouncy and squeaky all at once.

Beetroot is sliced thin and layered atop flaky pastry to make a savoury galette ($16) served with a flurry of herbs that taste as though they’ve come straight from the garden (because they have).

In a charming ode to the Australiana of the setting, Barrett does a version of dim sim ($15), the classic chip-shop staple, that is juicy, meaty and topped with chilli oil.

She makes the most adorable wonky little buckwheat blini to accompany the trout rillette ($24), which is served with herbs, onions and boiled eggs.

Bitter radicchio gets its place in the spotlight when paired with venison meatballs ($38), which taste like pure comfort.

Market fish – kingfish ($39) the day I was there – is beautifully cooked and crispy, served with an eggplant caponata and a lemony herb dressing.

The drinks list is an affordable showcase of mostly Victorian wines, plus a great selection of craft beers thanks to beer expert (and Barrett’s partner) David Osgood. Once again, as with all things Little Picket, the pretension is low but the quality is high.

I tend to bang on a lot about how Australian restaurants should be more explicitly Australian, about how they often aim for mimicry of other places – in New York, London, Paris – rather than embrace a more home-grown identity. This doesn’t just mean the use of native ingredients: Barrett and crew have given us a lovely example of another way to celebrate our own culture.

Sitting in this room, eating this food, enjoying the view out over the bowls lawn and being taken care of by these people, you could only be in Australia.

It’s this deep sense of place that makes Little Picket more than just a good restaurant in a bowls club: it makes it a glorious, pride-inducing, destination-worthy local. I can’t think of anything much better than that.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine