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No restaurant in the Hunter Valley’s recent history has been more seminal than Muse. With the sustainably minded fine-diner fresh off celebrating its 15th anniversary, chef-owner Troy Rhoades-Brown is serving the fruits of the first winter harvest from his own garden. His floor team providing a platform for emerging winemakers.

Muse is also an incubator for local talent: front-of-house staff are encouraged to upskill; chefs train under one of the Hunter’s most forward-thinking chefs. The investment pays dividends for the restaurant, but also the region, as people throw their skills into new projects and horizons.

One of these people is Frank Fawkner. Last winter, to celebrate its anniversary, Muse collaborated with a roster of chefs from as far as Aria, Firedoor and Pipit in Pottsville, but even though Fawkner came from just down the road, his name didn’t look out of place.

Fawkner started cooking at 15 and moved to London to work with celebrated chef Tom Aikens before settling in the Hunter. He became head chef at Muse and later opened EXP. with his partner, Emma. This year EXP. quietly marked its own anniversary, celebrating a decade in business. Its impact may not be as seismic, but in the past couple of years, it has slowly become the most exciting restaurant in the region.

Part of it was about floorplan. In 2023 the couple closed bakery-cafe Fawks, which operated alongside EXP. in the thoroughly uncharming Pokolbin Village Estate complex, giving more space to the main act. The rest is that the food and the whole experience have been sharpened to a fine point.

Compared with the Hunter’s other fine-diners, which tend to follow prix-fixe or tasting-menu formats presented as a steady procession, EXP. hits hard out of the gate with snacks: pie-tee cases piped full of beetroot and sour cream shipping smoked orbs of salmon roe; a chickpea shell filled with blitzed native greens and spices and finished with desert lime; a wagyu tartare tart overloaded with chives; a sourdough crumpet, macadamia butter seeping into the holes, topped with duck ham.

Apart from the theatre, the pops of intense and surprising flavours, these bites are a peek into the high-grade technique underscoring every dish. These moves make EXP., of all the places in the Hunter for a big night out, feel like the most current, the most steeped in modern sensibilities. There’s koji, there’s long fermentation, there’s rich (too rich) egg-yolk enriched sourdough, emulsions and espuma guns. But Fawkner’s strength is in using them to improve on the raw materials, then concealing the layers with deceptively simple presentation.

The duck course, for example, presents as a blush-pink slice of breast with jus, a circle of stuffed nasturtium and a blob of sauce. But the breast is dry-aged, glazed in honey and roasted on the crown, smoked over cherry wood, then finished over ironbark. The nasturtium is stuffed with caramelised ’kraut and duck-leg terrine, the cabbage lending acid and depth. That blob? Smoked duck-fat hollandaise. The jus? Sweetened with honey and rosella.

For sweets, what appears to be a sticky date is in reality a pudding made from late-season figs slowly caramelised like black garlic. Smoked sour cream, topped with Branxton pecans, is infused with roasted pecan shells, the butterscotch sauce with apple juice and year-old miso made in house. Another miso, made with chickpeas, is churned through butter with a whey caramel for the bread course.

More direct is crisp-skinned cobia, plated with a buttermilk dressing and charred brassicas over an emulsion of fermented green chillies. As you eat, the two sauces combine, building more layers.

This is serious cooking, in a temple-like room concealed from the street by sheer curtains, but EXP. doesn’t take itself so seriously that the joy’s sucked out. Whether you’re sat at the kitchen counter or at a table, newly promoted manager and sommelier Isabella Stibbard-Ribeiro keeps the tone light. She’ll pour aged Mount Pleasant semillon with the same level of enthusiasm as she will serve beguiling, beautiful Majama inzolia, fermented locally in Indian clay amphorae.

Sit ringside, and Fawkner is equally attuned to the dudes fresh from the cellar door at Tyrrell’s, plotting how to break 90 at The Vintage golf course, as he is to the clued-in couple toasting their anniversary in the next seats. On his advice, they might add a coffee stop at Meltdown in Huntlee and a dry-aged burger from Hungerford Meats Co to an itinerary that already takes in sundowners at Harkham Wines.

EXP. sits comfortably among these more new-school operators, but it doesn’t discard the old. It makes a point of repping local – Red Gate Farm duck, Binnie Beef wagyu, Mother Fungus mushrooms – but feels expansive, right through to a final box of bonbons, choux and jellies.

And just as the Hunter seems on the cusp of a tilt towards something new, by sharpening its focus, EXP. has put itself at the centre of what comes next. In doing so, it’s transformed from a restaurant to work into a long weekend in the Valley, into the very reason to plan one.

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