TINY BUT MIGHTY

Small restaurants pack a powerful punch with their intimate service and creative, sustainable menus, writes NADIA BAILEY.

- NADIA BAILEY

When Zoe Birch and her partner Lachlan Gardner decided to open Greasy Zoe’s – a diminutive 10-seater located in the leafy suburb of Hurstbridge, some 45 kilometres outside of Melbourne’s CBD – it wasn’t necessarily born from a romantic notion.

“It came out of a bit of frustration at the industry,” says Birch. “It got to a point where we thought, okay, we’re either gonna open our own place and do it our way, or maybe we have to think about doing something else.”

Their plan was to run the restaurant as sustainably as possible, with a “hyper local” approach to sourcing produce from similarly small-scale farms and producers in the region. Rather than hire staff, Birch and Gardner opted to do everything themselves: from harvesting vegetables on their suppliers’ farms to washing dishes at the end of service.

“The space is tiny – about five by four metres, and that’s including the kitchen and the bar,” says Birch. “It’s like being in somebody’s kitchen at home.”

With only 10 covers a night, Greasy Zoe’s is at the pointy end of the trend. But in the last few years, tiny venues – seating no more people than might be invited to a moderately ambitious dinner party – have sprouted up all over the country. Often loosely inspired by the Japanese omakase tradition, these restaurants favour intimate spaces, short guest lists, seasonal produce, and set menus – a model which has proven surprisingly robust, even in the challenging environment of the pandemic.