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Wine bars are, by definition, a place you go to drink wine. But in reality, wine bars do so much more than sell SSB by the glass. You go to wine bars for therapy sessions with friends. You go to wine bars on the bequest of dating apps. You go to wine bars to dissect the play or concert or footy game you’ve just seen.

And, increasingly, you go to wine bars to eat.

Of course, food has been part of the wine bar schtick for a while now (I still maintain that the dearly departed Must Winebar introduced Australia to the pleasures of charcuterie). But over the past decade, a distinctly wine bar-y style of eating and cooking has emerged.

Evolving in parallel with the rise of natural wine and food-slinging bottle shops in London and Paris, this approach is, compared to traditional restaurants at least, less structured and more relaxed in spirit. Menus are tighter and filled with snackier bits plus things that play nice with bread. Prices (generally) tend to be kinder to your hip pocket.

Unsurprisingly, wine bar eating has really caught on in Perth with customers well into the idea of organising catch-ups around bread, stracciatella and bottles of chilled reds. Increasingly, this model is also endearing itself to chefs with a growing number of escapees from – quote-unquote – “fancy restaurants” seeking refuge in wine bar kitchens around town.

One such chef is Sofika Boulton, an emerging kitchen talent that counts Wildflower and (the now-shuttered) Flour Factory as former restaurant workplaces.

As of July, Boulton has been on the pans and stoking the wood-fired grill at Sonny’s, a warm-hearted Mount Hawthorn hangout named after owner Jess Blyth’s rescue greyhound. Sonny’s is also a wine bar that’s very much in step with the genre’s casual neighbourhood zeitgeist. You can sit up at the bar, lean back into a banquette or make camp outside and enjoy the open-air theatre of Scarborough Beach Road. You can come in on a Friday afternoon between lunch and dinner and snack on olives, lustrous slices of wagyu bresaola, pickles (house-made although a bit light-on in serving size) and other cornerstones of contemporary wine bar cuisine. But look and order beyond the classics, and it soon becomes clear why many in the industry reckon Boulton is a chef to watch.

Boulton is a chef that’s cognisant of waste and the potential of outsider ingredients. She’ll stash strawberry tops salvaged from the bar and steep them in white vinegar and add shisho leaf to make a new-wave mignonette for oysters. Sweet raw red carid prawns (a by-catch caught by scampi fishermen) are diced and partnered with native sunrise lime to create a fleet-footed crudo. Heirloom cucumber all-sorts bought from the brilliant Manning Farmers Market are artfully arranged in a mortar of macadamia puree: another homage to summer’s bounty.

Complementing the small plates are a couple of proteins grilled over the hearth. There’s a lot to admire about how the kitchen handles its dry-aged coral trout: the fish’s skin is crisp and shard-like while the flesh has that pearlescent quality of seafood cook just-so. The trout appears tableside pre-sliced and afloat in what Boulton calls a “koji and chicken wing sauce”. You might like to call it a super-charged roast chook gravy that’s glossy, lip-sticking and mighty delicious. Both the fish and the sauce are excellent. I just wonder whether, together, they bring out the best in each other.

Another thought I wondered to myself: is Boulton actually a tortured baker doomed to roam the cosmos as a chef? Her puffy flatbread pocked with burn marks from the fire and slathered with a garlic chive butter is a delight, as is a clever and ornate pecorino and potato tart that brings together potato dauphinoise and cacio e pepe (Rome’s legendary sheep’s cheese and black pepper pasta) in holy matrimony. Best of all might be Boulton’s jiggly Basque cheesecake: nicely burnished on the outside, loose knit in texture and a winning one-two of sweet and sharp.

Even by wine bar standards, Sonny’s menu feels like it’s on the small side (although considering current staff shortages, clipped menus like this are a reality of running and maintaining nimble kitchens). A table of three could probably order everything and get through it all.

Your best play, however, is to spring for the good-value $60 chef’s menu. Not only does that get you most of the dishes on the carte at a discounted price, it also frees up your CPU to consider the drinks list that favours beverages – boozy and otherwise – made by female and nonbinary producers.

I’ve enjoyed watching Sonny’s find its groove over the past 18 months. The service – perhaps a little too matey and familiar on previous visits– has matured and in Boulton, the kitchen has a chef that gets the wine bar food brief. She has the skill set to both jazz up the familiar as well as defang the potentially alienating.

I’m looking forward to watching Boulton grow in this kitchen, not least when Sonny’s opens its new upstairs dining area Reggie’s (the name comes from Blyth’s other rescue greyhound) in March. In addition to a 14-seat communal table, Reggie’s will also feature a more ambitious menu that will afford Boulton more room to flex.

Wine bars, it would seem, are also a place chefs go to fine-tune their craft.