‘If this beachy pub was around the corner from my house, I’d eat there every week’

In recent years, Jo Barrett has centred her life’s work around impacting the ways in which regular Australians eat. At Little Picket in Lorne, Barrett transformed a normal bowls club into a phenomenon, precisely because she embraced the location’s normalcy rather than trying to subvert it – and was named The Age Good Food Guide Chef of the Year in 2023 partly as a result.

After that, she went on to co-found Wildpie, a project that aims to use feral animals that are already being culled to make delicious at-home consumer meals. For someone with Barrett’s talent and ambition, this focus on community and ecology is both unusual and commendable.

In some ways, her latest endeavour is a continuation of these ideas and ethos. The Surf Hotel, in Torquay, where she has taken up residence as chef alongside head chef Aaron Brodie, is a 16-room 1980s motel that’s been refurbished into luxury rooms, suites and a penthouse, all outfitted in mid-century modishness.

The restaurant has none of the lovable dagginess of the bowls club, but it does have its own significant charms. The dining room channels coastal luxury, tasteful plush browns and beige; it’s more upscale seaside pub than fancy restaurant.

Right now, it’s all warm chatter and neighbourly camaraderie. It will be interesting to see how much fun is possible in a few months when the sun is shining and the wide front deck is full of beachgoers. But, as is her nature, Barrett has signed on to helm pans in a restaurant that is definitively for the people, not for a privileged few.

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As such, the food isn’t the least bit fussy or precious. The cocktails are beachy rather than pretentious (think something called the Surf Wax that includes tequila and Malibu but manages to taste as unlike sunscreen as anything containing Malibu is able), there are local beers alongside Melbourne Bitter, and the wine list is approachable and affordable rather than geeky.

Barrett brings the Wildpie ethos to the Surf Hotel in the use of wild-caught meat from animal populations that are already being culled for ecological reasons.

The dim sims she made at Little Picket show up here, made from wild boar and tasting just enough like a traditional dim sim to set off your nostalgia sensors and just enough like a handmade dumpling to please the snob in you.

Wild venison schnitzel is crumbed in a panko and crisped, the flavourful meat perfect for this treatment, though the green sauce it sat in tasted of not much at all.

Taste isn’t an issue with a pristine tuna crudo, its ginger and saltbush accompaniment bringing out the freshness of the fish without distracting from it.

A slight Asian influence runs throughout many of the snacks: there’s a bright chicken and prawn larb, and venison la-lot – the Vietnamese skewers wrapped in betel leaf – served with a perky lemon aspen sauce.

The Surf Hotel will be an absolute treat for those avoiding meat altogether. There’s a creativity to Barrett’s use of vegetables that never veers into showboating, but instead asks each ingredient what it might achieve and then pushes it to live up to that potential.

There’s a wonderful, smooshy pumpkin with tahini cream, macadamia and saffron, and a stuffed rainbow chard main – ricotta and green olives make up the filling – covered in a bright sugo that I’ll be thinking about for months.

It’s hard to avoid the temptation to compare this restaurant too closely with Barrett’s other projects, or to give into the sense of sadness I still harbor that Little Picket was such a short-lived venture.

This is a different beast, perhaps without some of the magic of the bowls club setting, but with Barrett’s same core ethos in place: to create a venue where everyone is welcome, where the food is cooked with heart, and with an underpinning of dedicated and inspired environmental responsibility. If it were around the corner from my house, I’d eat there every week.

The low-down

Atmosphere: An upscale pub housed in your most fabulous friend’s designer beach house

Go-to dishes: Fish crudo ($26); wild boar dim sims ($18); stuffed rainbow chard ($36)

Drinks: Beachy cocktails, thoughtful selection of wines and beers, many of them local

Cost: About $180 for two, excluding drinks

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.