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“Fred! What’s happening? How’s Sydney’s most beautiful open kitchen? Are the workbenches still covered in bitter greens with fun-to-say Italian names? Is the wood oven still roasting those supernaturally crunchy spuds? Has the warm rice pudding with cider made a winter return? It’s been too long!”

Or, at least, that’s what I might say if there were a real-life Fred behind Fred’s. Merivale boss Justin Hemmes coined the name when his hospitality group opened the farmhouse-style restaurant in 2016. It was supposed to convey the humble nature of a new venue focused on “honest” food at the posh end of Oxford Street. I’m not sure a dining room with so much marble and heavy linen can ever be considered humble, but it was a nice pitch and the fine diner has been awarded two hats in the Good Food Guide ever since.

Founding chef [and now Good Food contributor] Danielle Alvarez was key to Fred’s success, developing relationships with NSW farmers and building on the rock-solid techniques she learned at California’s legendary, produce-championing Chez Panisse. The US-born chef left a little over 12 months ago, but there’s still a strong narrative of “farm to table” cooking. It’s also a wonderfully plush place to lose track of the time and consider another martini.

Irish-born chef Hussein Sarhan is now the head rattler of Fred’s hammered-copper pans, and he cooks the kind of minimal intervention, vaguely French food I like to imagine serving friends in my own kitchen (if only my apartment had a two-metre-long, coal-filled hearth).

We start with two-bite bricks of toasted panisse topped with a crab and kohlrabi sort-of-slaw. Delicious, albeit $18 each. The bill can skyrocket before you’ve even ordered booze.

Speaking of, Fred’s was the first Merivale restaurant to prominently feature natural wine, and there’s plenty of additive-free gear listed next to historic French and Australian drops (more bottles for less than $100 would be nice, though).

Roast chook is on the way and our sommelier recommends Alpha Box & Dice’s bright and leesy 2021 “Corrugated Castle” ($110), made from Adelaide Hills chardonnay. The 1989 Chateau Margaux ($5800) can wait. A one-kilogram rib-eye ($210) and whole eastern rock lobster ($250) can wait, too.

Sarhan grills a fine steak and shellfish, I’m sure, but he also approaches seasonal greens with the same enthusiasm I have for eating jaffles in bed. The salads are better value: bitter leaves of lettuce-like castelfranco, for instance, are teamed with walnuts, blue cheese and thin-sliced discs of raw Jerusalem artichoke ($28). It’s everything a salad should be: modest, beautifully dressed and alive with texture.

A ball of olive oil-drizzled mozzarella is $34, but it’s handmade from the milk of buffalo raised on pasture near Myall Lake, and you won’t taste a more luscious cheese outside of Italy. Silky ribbons of speck and confit chestnuts provide extra interest and crunch. Share a salad, the mozzarella and a pasta or two and you can leave Fred’s without haemorrhaging too much cash.

The weather demands something with heft, so we gravitate towards a well-executed white ragu of pork, with pappardelle so wide it could audition for lasagne ($34).

And yes, those rosemary-enhanced spuds ($16) are still rustling about, and still a glorious triumph of crackled edges and steaming white flesh.

Roast potatoes need roast chicken, and there’s a flattened maryland of Sommerlad-breed chook ($49) with borlotti beans and blitzed cavolo nero for the occasion. The skin is taut and a deep shade of amber, the meat long-flavoured and juicy.

A side of roasted and over-salted fioretto cauliflower ($16) is the only disappointment.

Oh, and the rice pudding ($22) is no longer served warm, but chilled and topped with rhubarb from Moonacres Farm at Robertson. It’s most probably a humdinger, but we roll the dice on a hot buckwheat crepe ($26) instead, sticky with a reduced apple sauce and brown-butter ice-cream. There are no regrets.

Share a salad, the mozzarella and a pasta or two and you can leave without haemorrhaging too much cash.

“Thanks so much for a wonderful dinner, Fred. The staff were engaged and efficient, and we simply loved the old-timey jazz soundtrack. The whole French farmhouse thing still feels a bit manufactured, between you and me, but the new chef’s commitment to seasonal produce is second to none, and that castelfranco salad is a cracker. We’ll have to splash out and order the lobster one of these days. See you again soon!”

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine