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Do restaurants have souls? It’s a question I pondered during a recent meal at Bar Liberty. The nine-year-old wine bar isn’t personality-driven, in the sense that there’s an owner-patron you always see there, or a chef who made the food their own. You don’t go to Bar Liberty for a particular dish, or even a cuisine. You aren’t rolling up for certain wines. You go there for a feeling, to connect with something like a soul.

Of the four founders – Michael Bascetta, Banjo Harris Plane, Manu Potoi (all ex-Attica) and Casey Wall (an American chef who recently returned home after 15 years), only Potoi remains, now as sole owner. During the decade Bar Liberty has been pouring wine, making impeccable cocktails and serving share plates, “Melbourne wine bar” has become a genre, a semi-templated place for crudo, focaccia, fresh cheese and probably a signature martini.

I’m up for it; you’ll find me in those places, loving the olives, mortadella and vermouth. But if you want to push past the orthodoxies, you could visit Bar Liberty. (Yes, and Embla, Carnation Canteen and a few others, of course. Don’t get mad.)

Zackary Furst, head chef since 2019, recently moved on to deepen his explorations of his Polish culinary heritage. He handed the baton to Douglas Hoxley, a Melbourne chef with experience at key restaurants including Cutler and Gimlet, and a year-long stint in London at nose-to-tail legend St John.

“It’s good when you go away to find yourself and you do find yourself,” Hoxley tells me on the phone. Although it’s the early days of his Bar Liberty custodianship, the signs are good. “Finding himself” means being able to mesh his ideas with Liberty staples, slowly stretching into the yonder.

Soft, oily, sourdough flatbread has long been served with vintage shears for snipping into morsels. Hoxley offers snail butter – garlicky, mildly meaty and delicious – as a spread, gently making the case the sustainable protein.

An unwritten Liberty law means there must be a starchy, peppery, cheesy course. In Casey Wall’s day, it was bucatini cacio e pepe. Furst looked to Eastern Europe, making potato dumplings with a sauerkraut juice reduction. Hoxley has embraced the legacy, dressing springy, dimpled potato pucks with lemony pepper and pecorino sauce, adding crunch with tiny crisps of potato skin. You don’t need to know any backstory to be lost in the pleasure of eating them.

Sugarloaf cabbage is softened and burnt, smoky and punchy, creamy and textured; bonus loveliness comes from spring onion and kelp. A root-vegetable tart finds luxury in celeriac, brightness in sorrel, energy in kohlrabi. A flathead dish is a spin on buttery meuniere, jazzed with green pepper and anchored by Jerusalem artichokes, the fish brined, butterflied and cooked with keen skill. Dessert bavarois (kindly called Bavarian cream on the menu because “buv-wa” can be off-putting to pronounce) is soft-set and juiced with roasted rhubarb. A scattering of bee pollen brings an almost awkward complexity.

Meanwhile, manager Ludovic Beauchamp-Chatel leads a team of knowledgeable, amenable professionals who make edgy, lesser-known wines (all organic, mostly biodynamic) feel fun and safe. If drinking is rock climbing, they are there suggesting the next foothold and belaying in case you slip and fall.

It’s a pleasure to be here, sitting at the bar, or in the backroom, or along the window facing Johnston Street, the hurriedly spray-painted and never updated Bar Liberty sign glowing like an endorsement of all the decisions that brought you to this moment.

Is it soul? Bar Liberty makes me think of great footy clubs, immortalising heroes on imaginary honour rolls, handing over traditions implicitly and explicitly. Spirit is steeped in everything from the timber to the playlists to the flavours and, of course, the customers who bring their own romance and energy, resulting in a sprightly institution full of meaning and delight.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.