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Sitting like a grand historic homestead on the road between Bangalow and Lismore, The Eltham has it all. Not just sunny indoor/outdoor dining, frosty beers on tap, pool table and wood-fired pizza oven, but also five bedrooms upstairs, and some of the liveliest live gigs in the Northern Rivers.

Built in 1903 and restored in 2019 by Matt Rabbidge and Luke Sullivan of the local Mosey On Inn group, it even has a kelpie at the door with his eyes fixed firmly on a tennis ball, should you care to give it a nudge with your foot.

Could it be more perfect? Yes it could.

Because The Eltham now has big city escapee Alanna Sapwell-Stone in the kitchen as head chef. After cooking at Saint Peter in Sydney, Arc Dining in Brisbane, and Beach Byron Bay, Sapwell-Stone did a three-month pop-up and never left.

She’s smart enough to dish up pub classics such as fish and chips with the local Ray’s Bream or flathead, parmies and burgers, and a good kids’ menu of minute steaks and chicken burgers. But she’s also putting the best of local produce to good use in contemporary dishes that feature on a specials board that changes daily.

From that list, I pluck a preserving jar of dense, smooth, house-made chicken liver pate with Jilly jelly, a ruby-red lid of jelly made with wine from the Jilly Wine Co. up the road near Clunes ($16). It comes with pickles and well-browned crisps, but actually works better with a puffy round of house flatbread, dripping with seaweed butter and crisp with saltbush ($10).

We’re in a pub, so there’s beer – everything from Grifter Pale Ale to XXXX Gold, expertly poured in chilled glasses. You just take your glass and wander around to find a table, inside or outside the front bar, in the pool room, or out on the shady terrace. There’s no dining room as such, and no table service, but you might score a table covered in wipe-clean green gingham check vinyl that will make your day.

The contemporary dishes are simple, but strong. A fried duck egg is fenced in by a bunch of skin-on potato wedges from local growers Jumping Ant, spiked with Worcestershire sauce ($15). It’s not an attractive dish, but it is fun to eat, dipping the spuds into the runny egg yolk.

The burgers are popular, as is pig’s head sausage with Yorkshire pud and a full-bodied onion gravy. Al dente paccheri pasta lolls about in a deeply meaty, shreddy ragu of local wild boar ($32) that zings with the acidity of tomato. The inner tubes of pasta have a good bite, and there’s no danger of running out of sauce.

A tiny Japanese hibachi barbecue fuelled by binchotan charcoal is the secret behind the char on a blackened bonito ($28), barbecued head to tail, but with bones removed. The crisp skin acts as a shield, allowing the oily flesh to be wreathed with smoke yet not overcooked.

It’s like eating sardines off the grill in Lisbon, but it’s off the barbie in Eltham instead, which is so much more romantic and exciting. Especially with a glass of Unico Zelo Fiano ($11/$46) from the Adelaide Hills.

An upside-down banana pudding with butterscotch sauce and cream is highly rated by the visiting leather-clad day-tripping bikies, but I like the lick of nostalgia that comes with a butterfly profiterole ($10). The little sweetie, technically a sugar-bobbled craquelin, oozes with pillowy cream and creme brulee custard, with a tangy core of Davidson plum jam at its heart. It’s a heart-stealer, right down to the doily and the vintage plate.

It’s all very relaxed, a bit random and easy going; the sort of place you’d order a shandy or a non-alcoholic Heaps Normal beer and just sit on it for hours, for the joy of being there and not having to leave. A magical country pub that’s worth a detour, now more than ever.