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Eighteen months ago, when Bec Shave and Ellie O’Brien ran their first hugely popular monthly pop-up at Marrickville diner Valentinas, they were asked why they were doing it. Shave remembers O’Brien answering: “We’re just a couple of badass bitches doing their thing.”

“I mulled over that for a long time,” Shave says. “Then we came to the idea of Babs and it just worked out.”

Babs, the name given to the pair’s collaborative chef pop-ups, which also featured at Kurumac, Earl’s Juke Joint and Aplenty, now adorns their first semi-permanent venue, a female-led bar and restaurant in the former Saga site.

A relaxed gem of a place, Babs focuses on food and drink from female producers. It is there only until mid-December.

That leaves 10 weeks to sample head chef O’Brien’s succinct and beautifully tuned food menu and restaurant and beverage manager Shave’s passionately selected cocktails, wine and beer.

Shave’s cheery bonhomie greets all. She suggests a two-sip Vesper-style martini, made with gin, vodka, vermouth and an olive, served in a dinky glass. It’s a perfect mouth kapow of soft, warming bitterness.

Using the bones of Saga’s decor – timber bench tables, wall counter seating, wood-framed walls – Babs has new lighting, softly pink ceramics and a Barbra Streisand album on every table, to honour Babs’ “Matron Saint”. Ours is Guilty, with Streisand and collaborator Barry Gibb nestling intimately in dazzling white satin on the cover.

The menu, hand-written by Shave on a lino-cut print design by artist Eva Balog, changes regularly. Headed by bread, olives and house pickles, it features five midsize snacky dishes, four mains including O’Brien’s handmade pastas, along with three sides and one or two desserts.

Start with the house-made challah bread, a nod to Streisand’s Jewish heritage, made with a hint of honey and excellent with creamy wodges of the house-churned salted butter.

Then, under the gaze of Coote’s wall prints of swim-suited figures unabashedly enjoying pasta, wine and a cocktail, order the pickled sardines, potato scallop and the chicken liver gougere.

The first, glimmering in Babs’s candlelight, are melty tender wonders. The second is a plump, crispy golden spud jewel. The third, a signature dish, is a decadent whirl of comte choux, filled with chicken liver parfait baubled with sour plum and shiso jam. The spaghetti alle vongole, a fragrant white wine clam pasta, goes in with unrestrained lust followed by the burnished onion tart, nutty and buttery and served with goat curd and herbs.

This week, O’Brien is offering gnocchi with green garlic sauce and ravioles du dauphine, the latter’s dainty pasta parcels lolling in burnt butter and filled with lemon and herb-laced buffalo ricotta.

Finish with spoonfuls of silky Grand Marnier caramel flan in Babs’s signature bundt shape.

Shave, keen for patrons to feel relaxed about choosing drinks, offers cocktails, beer and wine by female producers in Australia, Europe and the US.

“Wine can be too serious,” she says. “I want it to be approachable, affordable and something that you just go, ‘I can gamble on a $14 glass of wine and I can trust that it’s going to be great’.

“It will be the right wine for this moment. If you want to know more about it, we can have the conversation.” It’s the same with the cocktails, specifically the two-sip martini.

“It’s made with a beautiful vodka called Tilde by Natalie Ng in the Southern Highlands,” Shave says. “I love my martinis but I can’t drink a whole one and this is a lovely way to still have one.”

Shave and O’Brien want visitors, whether solo diners, pre-show snackers or groups in for a lengthy meal, particularly Babs’s Sunday lunches, to feel an instant level of ease and comfort.

“We’re not trying to be the entire experience for everybody,” Shave says. “We’re trying to be a venue that welcomes anybody to come and experience us.”

It may also be the only restaurant to offer beautifully arranged free period products in the bathroom should any diner require them. “The female-led aspect of our business is really important to us,” Shave says. “It’s a homage to the women in the restaurant industry and to the matriarchs of our families, our mothers and our grandmothers.” So, get in now.

“There’s 10 weeks left,” Shave says. “After that we’ll need a holiday.”