A buvette can really be almost anything, so long as it’s small, French and it serves drinks. Tight train station counter cafe? Refreshment stand at a market? Tiny neighbourhood bolthole doling dusty bottles of Noilly Prat? All buvettes.
Potts Point newcomer La Buvette meets the criteria: it’s small, it’s French and it serves drinks.
“It’s a small little bar that you’d like to go to with friends,” co-owner Nathan Sasi tells Broadsheet. “The one thing I really like about small spaces is they’re intimate – you can create a great atmosphere, even with just three or four people.”
And with just nine bookable counter seats on the inside (with room for 30 walk-ins outside), La Buvette is definitely intimate. The room is just wide enough to fit a pool table, but you wouldn’t be able to play without hitting the walls. Plus, the skinny little kitchen and bar seating are there. It’s such a brief snapshot on the street that you could easily walk right past the brass doors without clocking it.
This space – which housed beloved cafe La Buvette, the new spot’s namesake, until 2019 – is the smallest that Nathan and his long-time partners Morgan McGlone and wife Sali Sasi have worked with yet. None of the warehouse sprawl of their other spots Bessie’s and Alma’s, or the warrens and nooks of Vin-Cenzo’s. La Buvette even makes Bar Copains seem palatial. What you see is what you get: a combined bar counter and kitchen on one side, nine whimsically upholstered stools on the other, overlooked by warm textured walls, brass and timber accents. And a bit of French bric-a-brac scattered around, too.
Although La Buvette invites the perennial bar-or-restaurant debate, its Parisian food menu is just too seductive to resist for long.
“Paris is a city we love to dine in, and we’ve always had this affinity with French food,” Nathan says. “So this felt quite natural for us.”
Escargot in Cafe de Paris butter. Parisian gnocchi in mushroom cream. Gougeres piped with comté custard. Tartlets, saucisson, baguettes with butter, and oysters with champagne granita. Steak au poivre. Pommes frites. So many French culinary classics, punched up with enough bistronomic verve – and affection for the source material – to make them refreshed and exciting.
Just take the house-made duck neck and pork sausage, which arrives with a pagan-meets-Paris presentation: sitting in a pond of amber sauce alongside a duck’s head.
There’s plenty of panache on the dessert section, too. Like the apple pie, which is made to look like a trompe l’oeil homage to Paul Bocuse’s onion soup. Or the little crème caramel, served in studded Maison Balzac eggcups. Or the choux pastry swan, filled with coffee and chocolate cream, with white chocolate feathers.
“Sometimes you’re somewhere and the food’s amazing and the wine list is a little bit of an afterthought,” he says. “Here, they’re both on the same level.”
That means 23 wines by the glass, with plenty of rarer glasses available by Coravin. It also means a bottle list that’s three-quarters French, with a particular enthusiasm for red and white burgundies: the beefiest sections of the selection belong to pinot noir and chardonnay.
La Buvette, like all good buvettes, makes you feel like drinking. Not just wine, either. The house Martini, garnished with a cornichon, is enticing. As is the Cafe Royal Margarita – a riff on Marg ancestor the Picador – and the Boulevardier, made with banana-infused bourbon.
Potts Point has a lot in common with a Parisian arrondissement. It’s visually distinct, everyone seems to know everyone, and locals have long memories and strong loyalties. Hopefully the neighbourhood deems the new La Buvette to be a worthy successor to the old one – because Sydney needs as many buvettes as it can get, and La Buvette is the perfect way to start.
La Buvette
35 Challis Avenue, Potts Point
Hours:
Mon to Thu 4pm–late
Fri to Sun midday–late
labuvettesydney.com
@labuvette_pottspoint
Dining and Cooking