Superstar chef Rosheen Kaul is back. Get the first look at her new bistro

For the next two months, Fitzroy’s hottest restaurant table is set to be at Little Rose, a name you won’t know yet but soon will. Chef Rosheen Kaul and cocktail king Joe Jones have teamed up to turn the old Alta Trattoria site into a pop-up “Chinoiserie neo-bistro”, opening tomorrow, May 9.

What that means is “classical French cuisine seen through a Chinese and broader Asian lens”, according to Kaul. The venue riffs on the 17th- and 18th-century European decorative style of chinoiserie – inspired by the aesthetics of China and East Asia – and the great movement of neo-bistros in Paris.

While it’s “more playful” than Kaul’s most recent pop-up, Bistro Marigold in Armadale last spring, don’t expect slapdash fusion.

“The problem with fusion food sometimes is that there’s no reference point, or it’s just a deconstructed, less-good version of the original,” says the chef, who rose to prominence at hatted Etta in Brunswick East.

At Little Rose, she explains, “You’ll find familiar French dishes with Asian touches, where ingredients or techniques naturally or fundamentally meet … similar charcuterie traditions, reverence for similar ingredients like, say, morel mushrooms [and] a love for offal.”

Kaul is a fan of andouillette, the “controversial” French sausage made of coarse-grained pork intestine plus heaps of pepper, shallots and wine. With Meatsmith butcher Troy Wheeler, she’s created a similarly spiced version that “the average person would be willing to eat and enjoy”, using slow-cooked pork skin, and minced liver and shoulder.

Less meaty, more umami is Kaul’s take on vol-au-vent, which goes from a filled pastry to a substantial entree. A “puff pastry hat” crowns a stir-fry of both oysters and oyster mushrooms, joined by glazed negi (Japanese long green onion) and sauce au poivre powered by white pepper in a southern-Chinese-ish take.

A rotation of saute dishes could include squid with garlic chive and merguez sausage, while elsewhere chilled clams come marinated in the oxidative wine vin jaune.

Running the floor and the French-leaning wine program are James Tait and Luke Drum, who had the northern Italian Alta and its Sicilian successor Cantina Moro before flipping the Brunswick Street space to host residencies such as Little Rose, Pipis Kiosk’s pop-up and Sydney pasta diner Ragazzi.

Jones has worked on a collection of cocktails that won’t just bookend your meal, but can play along throughout. “They rise and fall in temperature and texture just like everything else, and the evolution in matters of minutes [while] they’re on the table make them as valid a food companion as whatever else,” he says.

Best known for his cocktail bar Romeo Lane (which closed in 2022), Jones is resurrecting some staple drinks including a peachy negroni and a coffee-spiked martini.

But there are some new creations, too. The G&T mixes dandelion gin, green apple and celery tonic; the signature gin martini stars chrysanthemum vermouth; and the non-alc Strawberry Fizz uses “this really perfumed green tea called Bird of Paradise as its base [that] gets an ambient infusion with its own weight in strawberries”, says Jones.

“Joey and I have been wanting to collaborate for a long time,” says Kaul. “I’m really excited to bring our two worlds together.”

Little Rose runs from May 9 to July 5.

Open lunch Sat-Sun, dinner Wed-Sun

274 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, littlerosefitzroy.com