A thousand things to drink: This Perth bar has one of Australia’s great wine collections

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Before you read this restaurant review about Wines of While, there are a couple of disclaimers that I wanted to get out in the open, starting with some personal considerations. I am far from a stranger to the Wines of While story.

Over the past six years, I have written extensively about the William Street wine bar, from pre-opening to its present day. I have washed dishes, played records, and grilled northern Thai sausages at events held at the bar. I play and have played on futsal teams containing past and present staff members. I’m also close with Emma Pegrum and Tom Van Beem, the bar’s current owners who bought Wines of While from founder Sam Winfield in December. In previous workplaces, I have commissioned work from Emma who I consider a brilliant writer and photographer. I’ve also booked Tom to DJ at various parties I’ve thrown over the years. I write all this in the interests of transparency and hope that you’ll trust me to, as I always try to do, write as honestly as possible and without favour or prejudice.

The second consideration, however, is more of a professional one. Since the bar’s change of management, the bar doesn’t employ a chef per se, but invites cooks to take over the kitchen for however long they can manage. Sometimes one of these pop-ups will last a couple of months. Sometimes the gig can be measured in weeks. Other times it’s a one-night-only sort of deal. Regardless of the length of the residency, the transient nature of the kitchen makes writing a restaurant review about Wines of While tricky, at least for readers who use restaurant reviews to help decide where to go out and what to eat.

Which is a shame, because Wines of While’s current chef-in-residence Branden Scott – who previously spent three years at the bar including a career-making stint cooking alongside fellow co-head chef Jack Botha – finishes up on Sunday. Or in tangible terms, you’ve only got a few days left to drop in and take the delicious things he is cooking for one last spin.

Things like a dishy steak tartare ($24), the steak cut thickly and dressed well before being tossed with diced gherkins, pickled onions and tiny petals of fried garlic. Two anchovies are laid reverently across the lot along with an egg yolk that you break up with your fork before folding into the beef to create a silky, unctuous mess.

In addition to being the name of an influential San Francisco bakery, a tartine is an open-faced sandwich popular in France. At Wines of While, ordering the crab tartine ($26) gets you two planks of toast primed with a heroic amount of butter applied to a thickness known in Denmark as tandsmør. (The word literally means “tooth butter” and is used to describe, according to NPR, “butter spread so thickly as to reveal teeth marks upon biting”.) Next comes a jumble of blue swimmer crab meat and shaved fennel and dill, shortly followed by quiet contentment.

Until Sunday, Wines of While might also be home to one of the finest steaks in Perth. The steak in question is a modest bit of rump cap from a grass-fed animal raised by Dandaragan organic beef ($45) that has been blessed with a good crack of pepper, then grilled in a hot pan until a shade past medium-rare. There is no talk of marble scores, nor is the cut presented tableside and on the bone in the interests of social media virality. Instead, the rump cap shows up pre-sliced, well-rested and armoured with a good crust. It also, gloriously, tastes of beef rather than fat: reason enough to seek out grass-fed beef when eating, let alone from an animal health perspective. (The digestive system of a cow, it’s worth noting, isn’t designed to handle grain.)

While beef this good doesn’t strictly need the deep savour of the molten café de Paris butter that it comes with, the two remain one of history’s great love stories. Astoundingly good house frites are the perfect icing on your steak: the pale, gently pliable potato wonders are hand-cut from Royal Blues then boiled and twice-fried till utterly perfect.

I describe the food at Wines of While as “European”. Not European in the sense of fine dining, cooks in pristine chef’s whites and towering toques, but as in European farmhouse where dishes are strongly influenced by seasonal ingredients and whatever’s at hand. Dishes like a salad ($20) contrasting chicory leaves – slender of body, sharp of taste – against sweet and juicy beurre bosc pear that’s been cleaved into fine slices. Toasted hazelnuts bring everything home. This combination doesn’t just click because acid, sweetness and crunch are good mates. It clicks because the seasons of these ingredients overlap and they’re all in the backyard or village market at the same time.

If the scene was somewhere in Italy, a thoughtful cook might reference the seasons by turning one of the winter pumpkins into a thick soup, then enliven it with a slash of lemon juice before using it as a sauce to dress chubby pipes of rigatoni ($32). These dishes are all things you might expect to eat if you dropped in for lunch at the home of a subsistence farmer working in the Loire Valley. Or the tiny dairy of a cheesemaker at the foothills of the Jura mountains. Or – most crucially – the home and cellar of the winemakers that make the organically farmed, un-airbrushed vino that Wines of While has championed since opening in 2018.

Although this is a restaurant review, one can’t talk about Wines of While without talking about wine, or specifically, natural wine: the at-times divisive term used to describe the lo-fi wines made with minimal additives, often using ancient techniques. As well as being able to enjoy wines by the glass, guests can buy bottles to enjoy at home or – with the addition of a corkage charge – drink the bottle at the bar. (This enoteca model of pricing was introduced to Perth in 2008 by Lamont’s Cottesloe, although the long-standing western suburbs wine haunt has very, very little in the way of natty wine.)

Co-owner Van Beem was the opening bar manager at Wines of While and in the six years since has gone even further down the natural wine rabbit hole. The way he talks about producers, regions and grapes is infectious (in the very best way) and in the time he and Pegrum have taken over the joint, Wines of While’s inventory has swollen thanks to additions from both his own cellar, plus wines from his own importing business. Between all the new and old wines plus the sakes, spirits and other intriguing alcohols on offer, there are around 1000 different things you and I can drink.

At the risk of drawing an especially long and tenuous bow, I can’t help but see parallels between the world of natural wine and Wines of While’s fluid cooking roster. As I see it, natural winemaking is about bottling an honest snapshot of a growing season that tells a story of time and place. The more things you add to your grapes – be it in the vineyard or in the winery – the less accurate the snapshot. Nature, as anyone who has a garden knows, is unpredictable. Despite mankind’s efforts to control the world around us, we’re really just playing pin the tail on a donkey that doesn’t much care very much for staying still. Some years growing conditions are brilliant and the resultant wine reflects that. Other years are disasters. Transparent, honest winemaking – and, indeed, all skews of agriculture – reflects these vagaries.

And so it is with the food at Wines of While. Since the beginning, menus have been kept tight and in a state of flux – remember those early blackboard menus? – so that chefs could best honour the seasonal ingredients they were buying from farmers and local Northbridge grocers. Not there during the short window that live whelks were available? Too bad. How about while summer peas were available? Did you dawdle and miss out on that Instagram-ready raviole du Dauphine filled with Comte that Blake Ellis was serving over summer? Better luck next time. To paraphrase English poet Geoffrey Chaucer: seasonal, short-lived ingredients and intricate dishes wait for no man.

What if a similar fluidity was introduced to the kitchen? Considering the growing number of chefs embracing a vagabond cooking lifestyle and gathering experience while travelling the state, country or even planet, now seems like an apt time to roll the dice and see what happens. Pegrum and Van Beem certainly haven’t been afraid to try new things as they go about turning Wines of While into a community space rather than just a place to eat and drink.

The next lot of changes include welcoming Guy Jeffreys into the kitchen for a five-week residency from July 11-August 5. The former chef and head gardener at Jarrahdale’s Millbrook, Jeffreys’ grow-it-yourself approach seems perfect for Wines of While with home-grown veg plus hard-to-find ingredients forming the cornerstone of his menus: think raw vegetables with preserved swordfish, a cavolo nero and white bean soup spiked with chilli oil, plus rare cheese excavated from the caves at Cambray. He’ll also be doing menus for the $55 Sunday set lunches (daytime has always been my favourite time to dine at Wines of While; room-temperature food always tastes best in warmer weather and most of the bar’s food tends to be room-temp) as well as a no-waste Monday that turns leftovers from Sunday lunch into a one-dish dinners that will be offered alongside selected bottles of wines that can be drunk minus the usual corkage fee.

The front-of-house stocks have also been bolstered by Amber Kennedy and Sam Rogers, two wine bar pros that Pegrum and Van Beem befriended while living in Melbourne. Between them, Kennedy and Rogers – Wines of While’s new joint managers – have an impressive resume with former workplaces including Melbourne’s Public Wine Shop plus The Moorcock Inn, a natural wine stronghold in West Yorkshire, England. Early interactions with Kennedy and Rogers suggest they’ve fit right in with the bar’s unforced, natural service style.

Considering that the food component of Wines of While sits outside “normal” restaurant conventions, it’s a bit tricky to put a score out of 20 on it. (Although, personally, I feel that hospitality would be all the better if more places adopted some of the bar’s long-standing attitudes to cooking and sourcing.) If you’re someone who likes the certainty and reassurance of consistency, you might think that the score at the top of this review is generous. I get it. Perhaps you’ll take some solace in the knowledge that the bar’s nicely burnished and chewy sourdough bread served with cultured butter ($6 per person, still one of Perth’s best breads) remains a permanent menu fixture.

But if you’re the sort of person whose memory and camera memory cards are filled with snaps from places such as Manfreds in Copenhagen, London’s 107 Wine Shop & Bar (nee P Franco) or Septime Cave in Paris, you’ll no doubt think my score is 14.5 is pitifully low, but you won’t care. You’ll already have your favourite table out on the William Street footpath; have hidden a bottle of hard-to-find Beaujolais somewhere in the shop for you to buy later; and proudly consider yourself a regular. For you too, I suspect, are no stranger to the Wines of While story.