If hospitality consultants got their hands on the plans for St John restaurant, there’s not a chance the influential London venue would have opened its doors back in 1994. Serving calf’s liver and jellied rabbit leg in an austere dining room just a few steps from the city’s meat market, St John – then and now – blazed its own trail, leaving the rest of us to catch up.

Next month, Melbourne plays host to Fergus Henderson and Trevor Gulliver’s world-famous restaurant, as the team takes over French Saloon in the CBD for five days as part of Melbourne Food & Wine Festival. Fans will be delighted to get another plate of roast bone marrow without the 26-hour trip to London. First-timers should prepare for a starkly written menu of uncommon ingredients, making the generous wallops of flavour all the more surprising.

“It’s very hard to do what they do and do it well,” says Ian Curley, co-owner of French Saloon. “It’s all about the ingredients and the way they’re delivered.”

“They’re restaurant royalty,” he adds.

This event is the latest that he’s worked on with Gulliver and Henderson (although this time Gulliver, St John’s wine guru, is making the trip with Farokh Talati, head chef at St John Bread and Wine).

When Henderson, a self-taught cook and former architect, began serving humble British dishes such as boiled ham with parsley sauce in the ’90s, it was radical. Overwrought French fine-dining was the fashionable thing at that time in London. But eventually, simplicity won out.

“When people talk about temples of gastronomy, we’re not talking Noma,” Curley says. “[St John] is the place people from Noma go when they want to eat.”

Later, Henderson’s book Nose to Tail Eating sparked a revolution in the way chefs and diners thought about waste.

“Chefs can be this voracious mob where we’ll cook anything,” says Brigitte Hafner, owner-chef of two-hatted Tedesca Osteria in Red Hill. She remembers reading Nose to Tail as a chef in her 20s. “For the first time I thought, ‘There’s an animal here’. Fergus was saying, let’s respect that.”

Today, the fin-to-tail seafood cookery of Sydney chef Josh Niland, the many restaurants making their own charcuterie or buying in whole animals, and the celebration of overlooked ingredients can often be traced back to St John.

“The thing I learned the most at St John was [having] confidence in your food – and restraint,” says Melbourne chef Tom Sarafian, who worked as chef de partie at the Smithfield restaurant 10 years ago.

He remembers eating at the restaurant before he got the job and being awed by the swagger of serving a single boiled artichoke with vinaigrette. Another favourite dish is the Welsh rarebit. “It’s cheese on toast, but it’s so good and so special because of all these little [St John] touches.”

Few restaurants age as gracefully as St John, which celebrated 30 years last year. (Locally, France-Soir comes to mind.) Hardly any reach that age at all, let alone grow. The original St John in Smithfield is still open daily. There are two more restaurants in London, three bakeries, four books and a winery in France, which will be supplying wine for the Melbourne pop-up.

One reason for its long-term success is that, all these years later, St John is still recognisably itself. There’s been no pivot to tapas or tasting menus, no sibling venue doing pizza. Henderson and Gulliver know what they’re about and have never forgotten it.

“We often say that we are always the same, but never the same, and that nature writes our menu,” says Gulliver. Local fruit, berries, seafood and herbs are in the sights of chef Talaki when it comes to the Melbourne menu.

All the hits will be there: roasted bone marrow with parsley salad and toast, Welsh rarebit, devilled kidneys, and Fernet-Branca-spiked Dr Henderson ice-cream. While set menus are never done in London, it’s a necessity for the pop-up, although diners will get several choices for each course. Think rock flathead with bread and capers, quail and aioli, and mackerel with red cabbage.

Famously, St John has never cluttered its dining rooms with flowers or art. Guests at French Saloon will get a taste of that austerity. Tables will be covered with white tablecloths and butchers paper (the St John team even specified what grade of paper to buy), and set with the same wine glasses and salt and pepper shakers used in London.

It’s that care for the tiniest of details that continues to inspire chefs, restaurateurs and generations of fans the world over.

St John Melbourne, March 25 to 29, French Saloon, upstairs, 46 Hardware Lane, Melbourne. melbournefoodandwine.com.au

Read next:

How to nail the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival if you’re from interstate

Fergus Henderson on how to throw the perfect picnic

Julia, Curtis and St John: Get set for a huge Melbourne Food & Wine Festival