Situationships end in one of two ways: trainwreck or happily ever after. After four years of will-they-won’t-they, we finally have the next chapter of the P&V and Porcine story. And it’s not a messy split. Instead, these two crazy kids are taking the plunge and committing to each other.
In late March, French bistro Porcine and bottle shop and wine bar P&V Paddington, which have occupied the same 268 Oxford Street premises together for four years, finally joined forces to launch L’Avant Cave. It sees Porcine – who had always provided ad hoc bits and bobs for P&V’s patrons to nibble on – formally take on dedicated food duty for the wine bar.
For years, the upstairs Porcine team had to share a downstairs kitchen with the P&V folks prepping snacks for the wine bar – which was a tight squeeze. This move allows Porcine to streamline its operations and offer a more casual, dressed-down take on its food, while turbo-charging the food on offer at P&V.
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“With Porcine and P&V, one hand’s always very much washed the other,” says Porcine chef and co-owner Nik Hill. “Since the start, we’ve had this symbiotic relationship, but this is the first time we’ve put the two the together, and it’s a lot of fun.”
The menu’s explicitly snacky, because “a lot of wine bars just do restaurant food – like whole fish, big steaks,” Hill says. “Which is great, but we want to do a menu where you can just eat one or two small things with a drink and then you’re good.”
“It’s an extension of what we do upstairs at Porcine,” says co-owner Matt Fitzgerald. “But it’s about smaller, lighter, fun things.”
Some of those fun things include a panisse with quince and mimolette cheese; garlic snails, plated sans shell to remove the need for snail tongs; and a hefty croque monsieur that’s perfect to split between two. An early best-seller – and a favourite of Hill’s – is L’Avant Cave’s take on Melba toast, which uses pigeon liver pate.
Hill soaks the livers in milk and makes a parfait from them, resulting in a spread that’s “super creamy, with minimal iron, that’s as close to foie gras as you can get,” he says. “It’s a magical product and it’s pretty hard to get a pigeon supplier, so this one will be hard to find elsewhere.”
Duck, deer, snails, pigeon. If it’s a French dish and you could easily find the key ingredient in a park in Europe, it’ll probably be on the menu at L’Avant Cave at some stage.
This week, partly as a concession to his new Quebecois chef, Hill’s also just put a poutine on the menu – starring a chicken gravy he mastered during his days at The Old Fitz – that will stay through at least winter.
This rainy, frigid time of year is a tricky season to launch a 20-ish seat bar that’s mainly al fresco. But summer venues are built in winter, and when Broadsheet visited on a Thursday night, it filled up quickly. Paddo locals are already lapping L’Avant Cave up. It won’t be long before everyone else does.
L’Avant Cave has also enticed Cafe Freda’s long-time manager Patrick Litschka, as well as Cafe Freda’s long-time umbrellas, to make the move further up Oxford Street – adding to the warmth, polish (and sun safety) that P&V already had in spades. And P&V’s superlative drinks offering – with plenty of wine, but also cracking cocktails, beers and non-alcs – is still here and better than ever.
Porcine and P&V’s relationship hard launch is a complete success. So this week, we’re adding L’Avant Cave to The Hot List. Maybe friends with benefits should shoot their shot more often. Because if it can lead to something like L’Avant Cave, it’s worth having a crack.
L’Avant Cave
268 Oxford Street, Paddington
Hours
Thu 4pm-11pm
Fri & Sat 12pm–11pm
Sun 12pm–7pm
@lavantcave
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