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Once upon a time, there was a Fremantle wellness emporium called Mother.
The progeny of Emma and Heath Daly’s market-stall-turned-cafe Raw Kitchen,
Mother was Freo’s ground zero for mindfulness and offered eating and drinking
options galore for those that wanted to soften their consumer footprint.

Last year, after the restaurant’s final service on (fittingly) Mother’s Day, the Dalys
vacated the premises and made way for new tenants with new ideas for the space: namely, rebooting it as a wine drinker’s wonderland, H&C Urban Winery.

In less than a year, this soaring warehouse went from Skins activewear to skin-contact wines; from vegan cheeseboards to cheeseburgers; from vinyasa to “vin? Yassss-sah!“; and from Mother to H&C Urban Winery, a rollicking indoor beer garden that thinks it’s a wine bar.

To be fair, despite Mother’s clean-living ethos, it also served wine and alcohol, just not on the scale of H&C. The name, incidentally, is derived from Heroes &
Comrades: a wine brand established by ex-footballers Chris Masten and Will
Schofield who are owners, along with Phil Thompson and Ross MacPherson of The Local Hotel, plus wine distributor Scott Spalding.

But back to the booze. There are 25 wines by the glass (from $10.50) plus stacks
more by the bottle. Cocktails, tap beers and ciders are also on-hand, as is a micro-winemaking facility and barrel room. (Licensing hold-ups and an early vintage, sadly, meant wine wasn’t made on-site in 2024.)

Between the barrel room and the main bar with its exposed brick and pub-style
seating, H&C can host some 400 revellers. A small bar this ain’t. Which means that, like all big-volume operations, H&C needs to offer accessibility. Thankfully, you’ll find it among the snacks, small plates, big plates, desserts and kids’ meals on the menu: a menu that, like they say in the movies, has something for everyone.

Some dishes chime with the well-stocked-fridge-and-pantry approach embraced by wine bars everywhere: the olives ($9), the cheese plates ($35), the sliced meats ($35; supplied by gun charcutier Melissa Palinkas of Ethos Deli) and other finger-friendly snacks.

Some dishes feel like throwbacks to the space’s Mother era, although you don’t need to be vegan, lactose-intolerant or coeliac to admire the earthy sweetness of a dense carrot and cashew dip presented alongside wavy pappadams ($16). And some dishes feel like show-and-tell items from chef Gordon Kahle’s time in WA kitchens.

Among the small plates, the cryptically named “prawn, nduja, radish” ($24) – a
thrilling arrangement of poached prawn pieces and roasted radish in a lurid oil
buzzing with chilli – recalled a winning octopus and bacon mayo dish from Kahle’s stint at Douro Street’s short-lived The Crowded House. At the other end of the meal, a silky, mascarpone-like blob of coconut “sorbet” crowned with a ribbon of poached pear ($16) felt like the kind of composed dessert Kalhe served at Heritage, the wine-centric CBD establishment that he cooked at for three years before boarding the good ship H&C.

While our man knows how to assemble an Instagram-ready plate of food, he also
understands the value of playing to his audience. A gratifying double cheeseburger ($28) – mince by farming co-op Dirty Clean Food; slices of American cheese for that lush, plasticky mouthfeel; shaved lettuce doused in a bright Big Mac-ish sauce – flanked by chunky chips is precisely what you want to eat at a pub: familiar, comforting and undeniably delicious.

Along with the fish and chips ($29) and an eggplant parmy ($29), the burger ticks the box for a trad counter meal for one.

Of course, menus as big as H&C’s aren’t infallible. Asparagus and sauce gribiche
may have co-headlined one of the vegetarian offerings ($22) yet both were swamped by a landslide of rocket leaves. Overcooked lamb loin ($42) detracted from an otherwise pleasing one-two of fat mushrooms and a fermented chilli sauce that hummed with Mexican salsa piquancy. Such is life when you’re designing big, inclusive menus that need to be executed at speed and at scale.

While easy-going service feels well-pitched for Freo, some staff are a little too easy-going at times. Then again, green service is, regrettably, starting to feel par-for-course while operators do their best to staff venues while hiring from a dwindling pool of candidates. (Just quietly, I wonder if a venue the size of H&C might benefit from adopting QR code ordering?)

And as impressive as the drinks list is, I’m not sure staff are full bottle on its intricacies.

But is that a bad thing? Savvy wine drinkers should be able to identify some snappy bargains on the list. And as raucous as H&C might get on weekends, weekdays offer opportunities to enjoy quieter moments and some sharp food and drink deals.

(There’s a lot to admire, too, about operators daring to open seven days from noon and to keep the kitchen open the whole time.) For some, finding peace is about kombucha and Pilates. For others, self-care looks like pet-nat and fried chicken ($24). After all, circa 2024, wellness can take many forms.