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If one dish sums up Babyface Kitchen, it’s a skewer of charcoal-licked greenlip abalone, chicken thigh, pork belly bacon and lardo in a lake of savagely good tomato butter.

Then again, maybe it’s the hulking Moreton Bay bug schnitzel with a creamy salt-and-pepper sauce made from the creatures’ heads.

Hefty flavours and equally assertive textures run the length of owner-chef Andy Burns’s hard-to-pin-down menu, steered by well-sourced produce and far-flung inspiration.

Japanese ideas are a constant, as are native ingredients, but fun is very much the through line, in football-shaped fried dumplings stuffed with caramelised pork belly and Port Lincoln squid, say, or a smoked-brisket cigar that outstretches the plate, with a blot of rhubarb ketchup.

That playful mood is alive in the high-ceilinged room, too – or maybe it’s just the progressive wine list talking, arguably the Illawarra’s most forward-thinking.