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There’s a thirst around the world right now for ultra-exclusive restaurants. Some, like Frog Club in New York, don’t permit photos, and their websites give away little. For others, you need to have the right connections, a bit like getting into the MCC Members’ Dining Room. At the extreme end, you may need to enlist a scalper, something even Melbourne diners have resorted to for Chae, one of the city’s smallest restaurants.

Greasy Zoes in Hurstbridge serves eight diners at a time, which is, by any definition, exclusive. It costs $190 a head to eat there (drinks are extra), a bill that’s not within everyone’s reach. Yet, nothing about this restaurant feels elitist.

Couple Zoe Birch and Lachlan Gardner started out with 14 seats and a choice of a la carte or set menu when they opened seven years ago, but have settled on eight as the magic number for a few reasons. It means they don’t need staff, can work with suppliers whose ethics they support, and get more time with their two young children.

Despite nearly halving in size, they doubled their headgear, earning two hats after the pandemic as Birch tightened her focus to suppliers with stronger eco-credentials while expanding her set menus and the techniques on show.

You won’t find the baller beef, caviar bumps and gold leaf of other exclusive fine-diners. Greasy Zoes trades in a different kind of indulgence: the preciousness of time, and having a chef slow down to make butter by hand for guests, then use it in her house-made croissants.

As a first bite, little wheels of Birch’s croissant dough hold a few clues about what’s in store. Slathered in creamy curd, they might have been topped at other restaurants with anchovy or cured meat. But she crowns the pastry with broccoli leaf, an heirloom vegetable distinct from boring old broccoli (yes, it’s news to me, too). Grilled briefly over the fire, the bitter leaves are as delicious and charry as any sausage cooked on a backyard Weber. They may just be greens, but in Birch’s hands they become something gutsy.

It’s difficult to imagine how so much – curd, croissant, butter – can be made from scratch by one person in this speck of a restaurant, smaller than some families’ dining rooms.

Walk through the front door and after about two steps, you’re standing in the middle of the place. A pitched timber ceiling, earthy colour scheme, turntable and knick-knacks make it feel like a one-room alpine cottage, although for some that could feel a little too homey.

But the size is spot on for a one-man floor team. Gardner keeps each table pretty well in sync with dishes and paired drinks, including wines from family-run estates and booze-free things made there. Blackberry jun is a bright, fermented drink similar to kombucha but not as sour. In between top-ups, Gardner will also flip records and tell you about the guy who carved the mushroom sculptures that sit on your table.

It’s difficult to imagine how so much can be made from scratch by one person in this speck of a restaurant.

Around this little shack is spun a web of makers and growers. Celeriac, one of the most unfortunate-looking vegetables, is given the type of love normally reserved for fish, perhaps because Birch and Gardner know this celeriac took the farmer five months to grow. A sweet nub of the knobbly root vegetable comes in a luscious butter emulsion brightened by finger lime and dill.

You’ll reach the sixth course before you even realise you’ve not had meat. And you probably won’t miss it.

When it arrives, it’s chicken thigh with deeply gamey flavours thanks to slow rearing and dry-ageing. The dark meat is cooked over redgum until the skin is like a piece of malty, delicious bark.

This is Birch’s most exceptional skill – her command of smoke, making it the most subtle element of a dish through to its defining feature. As she calmly cooks over embers, she also plates up and washes dishes.

I couldn’t in good conscience tell you to travel to Hurstbridge for bread and butter. We’re living in a golden age of restaurant bread; we hardly even look up when another dark-crusted slice is placed before us. But Greasy Zoes’ is the loaf I’d pick 10 times out of 10.

Its sinewy insides pull apart almost like a croissant and, slathered in kefir butter made dangerously good by sunflower seed miso, it’s every bit as satisfying. It’s just one of her many old-school methods that coax the maximum out of the ingredients around her.

There’s room for restaurants of all sizes and models in cities today. But I’m happy that Greasy Zoes is leading the pack of tiny diners pursuing ambitious, delicious cooking while still looking after their people. That’s much more impressive than getting past a roped-off entrance.