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There’s only one chef in Australia who would speak of a salad as “over-friendly, humping your leg on the way to the table”. I’ve never been loved in that way by lettuce, but I get what Philippa Sibley is saying as she describes greens gone wrong.

A salad can be slovenly or haggard, and it can also be too keen, like a lolling, slobbery Labrador. Her Friendly Salad ($12) at Pinotta does not hump. Every leaf has been selected for its pert curl and bright crispness; it’s sassy but not domineering.

The fond, stern attention given to a side dish is a sign of this great chef’s relationship with the craft of preparing food. Sibley has been cooking professionally since 1989, a little bit in Europe, but basically in Melbourne, where she has worked at (and occasionally owned) restaurants including Tansy’s, Est Est Est, Luxe, Ondine, Circa the Prince, Prix Fixe, Albert Street Food & Wine, Syracuse and most recently Hero at Federation Square.

She hasn’t built an empire. You wouldn’t call her moves strategic. You might wonder how she got pigeonholed as a pastry chef when she makes one of the best duck sauces in town. But you could be sure of one thing: wherever it is, people feel happy eating her food.

Charming bistro Pinotta is a great fit for the peripatetic Pip Sibley. Heidi Modra’s restaurant opened 13 years ago, and she runs it like a general store in a country town, maybe a bit like Cummins on SA’s Eyre Peninsula, where she grew up. People walk by with their shopping and stop for a hug. Local kids draw her pictures. Her sense of community is a magnet and salve.

A former graphic designer who sought work that offered more human connection, she’s battled through hospitality’s hard times, anchoring herself in this 50-seat restaurant with its chatty front bar and small central kitchen that squeezes diners past it to the rear dining room.

The neighbourhood restaurateur was intimidated when Sibley was suggested as her next chef, but the women connected over a belief in the honour inherent in looking after people in restaurants. And music. Modra played a record during the job chat, Where Are You Baby? by the English rapper Betty Boo. “But instead of playing it at 45rpm I keep it on 33rpm,” Modra told me. “So it’s like a slowed-down, hypnotic version of a very ’90s song.”

It’s a wonder how Sibley got pigeonholed as a pastry chef when she makes one of the best duck sauces in town.

Sibley started last spring and the pairing has turned into a golden period for Pinotta. There’s a bright energy in the room, the service has lifted, the wine list is zippy and fun, and the kitchen has identity. Each afternoon, Sibley tells Modra what’s cooking, and the latter sits down to handwrite a menu, ephemera that turns into a wine-splotched archive of Sibley’s repertoire.

The food is provincial French and Italian, full of details that feed into the delight. Focaccia ($8) is made Pugliese-style with hot potato in the dough. Oysters ($6 each) are shucked with precision and respect.

There will be arancini ($8), maybe with pumpkin roasted twice to concentrate its sweetness. Blood oranges for a fennel salad ($26) will be segmented as though by laser.

Confit duck ($48) is spiced and judiciously salted with a fragrant jus. If some meat sauces are like getting stuck in a bog, this one is like splashing joyfully in a shallow puddle of spring rain.

Tiramisu ($18) is a little jazzed up: mine had a layer of hazelnut sponge that turns a nonna staple into a fine dining dessert.

You’d expect such an experienced chef to be a master of her instrument; the true luck is that she still loves playing it.

Take the tonnarelli ($45), a long pasta, here dyed black with squid ink. The strands are tumbled with nettle butter that’s also flavoured with roasted prawn shells. Nubbins of prawns are tossed through, too. The shellfish should be the hero but it’s the nettle that startles, the verdant green on the dark pasta, bold, humble, deeply delicious.

We could have a conversation about whether cooking is craft or art but there’s something else here that makes the distinction easy. A few years ago, Sibley wanted a hobby that created less mess than cooking. She bought pencils from Coles, started drawing and was unable to deny she was good at it. Her large, detailed depictions of oysters, artichokes and grapes are astonishing: some of her art is on the walls here.

Is it a stretch to wonder about the meeting place between sauteing and sketching? There’s something in restraint, knowing when a piece is done, the use of basic tools – heat, salt, green, grey – to turn the everyday into the sublime.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine