WHERE
Ester, Chippendale

WHY
"For a first restaurant, they've done an amazing job. The food is fantastic, so flavoursome and very authentic with a European touch.

It was very well cooked, wholesome food, I just don't think you could fault it as a first restaurant. It reminded me of River Cafe [in London] with a bit of Italianness; it's refined but rustic and the food is organic and seasonal, imaginative and well-cooked. It wasn't tricky.

It's a really good price for what was delivered. I don't like fine dining that is too overworked. It's very relaxed and the service was great once we got a table – we had to wait a long time even though we had a booking. Two seatings are hard to manage, and there's no bar where you can sit down and relax. I think they could soften their environment a bit.

It's like parts of Paris. Chefs are going into neighbourhoods where rents aren't high and putting quality foods on the table. As a customer, you don't really want to be paying for the rent – you'd rather be paying for the food and the wine."

WHAT
"I'm a vegetarian, but I eat seafood. The bread was amazing – probably not a good thing because I could have eaten a whole loaf of it! We had the most amazing prawns, fish and chicken – fresh, elegant, it wasn't complicated. Salad was fantastic, it wasn't out of bag. You can always tell.

At home, I cook a lot of Mediterranean food; I experiment a lot with risottos and I've just done a whole batch of preserved lemons. I look at what's in the garden so our ingredients are very fresh. The flavours are all there so I don't need to overdress. We do barbecues; I don't use a of of butter. And we have a pizza oven – we do a lot of cooking in that: potatoes, pumpkins, lots of herbs and garlic. Our food is very social and it's about sharing. We were going to have this party and we had to cancel it, so for three days we've had lobster with tarragon and lobster salad, lobster sandwiches with watercress. Our food is simple and good quality - it's quality, not quantity.

ABOUT 
"I'm kind of freelance now! I'm meant to be lying down in a hammock and reading a book, but I've got some interesting projects on this year, so I'm working on my Powerhouse Museum exhibition, which opens in August. We're going through the archives; it's quite a big project. I'm working on a few interesting collaborations and creative projects with like-minded people and I have my book launch in London in February, and then Paris Fashion week and to New York in April. You get more done when you're busy. I'd rather get lots done on a few projects than work all the time.

ESTER
46 MEAGHER STREET, CHIPPENDALE, 8068 8279, ester-restaurant.com.au

Entrees, $4-20; mains, $16-$36; desserts, $4-$15. Dinner for two, $90, plus drinks.

FOUR OUT OF FIVE STARS

REVIEW
If I had a wood-fired oven, I too would stick everything edible into its fiery, furnacy belly, from radicchio to chillies to beef intercostals to fish to nori to dough. It's almost as poetic as cooking over a campfire, though undoubtedly, in the case of Ester, with far more studied and meticulously planned results. The Chippendale restaurant does clever things with the ancient approach to heating food and brings it slap, bang up to the now-now with imaginative flair that is as exciting as it is nuanced.

Helmed by former 121BC man Mat Lindsay and with steerage from Vini, Berta and 121BC's Andrew Cibej, Ester skates the fine-dining-without-stuffiness line beautifully. There's unfussy, efficient, knowing service to rustic, deceptively simple-looking dishes that are heralded with the three-part clue: octopus/potato/nduja; or cauliflower/almond/mint. How those three ingredients end up is always a world away from the curtailed description.

The room is wine cellar meets garage meets paint-barely-dry Spanish cantina. It's efficient and informal and respectable. Wines are diverse and offbeat.

On our table, blood-sausage sanga is a triumph of worlds colliding:a deep red and feisty little snag - in the style of French boudin noir - on a sweet, white slice of bread that comes together in an elevated Australian sausage-sizzle deliciousness.

Beef intercostals are marinated in "fermented rice" and I want oozy, charred, pull-apart meat but instead struggle with a blunt knife and tough beef. (The kitchen had no steak knives, we were informed, but was happy to cut the meat for us. Not wanting to give up, we turned the offer down.) But, praise be, the flavour of that beef: gamey and smoky and woody and rich, especially good with the acids in the accompanying dressed radish and wood-fired radicchio. Yu-um.

A generous bowl of greens is sprinkled with crisps of garlic and dressed in fermented chillies.

They love a bit of nori, does the team at Ester. It came to our plate at the start of our meal in burnt and inky droplets of infinitely elegant raw fish with celery - marinated and in tiny leaf form. It was so carefully measured that its pungency didn't overdo the citrus, green and oily flavours. It came in a sludgy, slightly off-putting if wonderfully umami-laden buttery broth, home to a family of moreishly sinewy, salty little clams. It was there the last time I visited, too, smeared onto a bowl and paired with corn.

But the desserts. Oh me oh my, were they good. Three milks is a plate daubed with dulce de leche, splodged with panna cotta and airy sheep yoghurt and finished with olive oil and oily biscuit crumbs and rosemary... and it is fabulous. I can only thank fortune for some accidentally excellent ordering, because paired with our salted caramel semifreddo - the best ice cream I think I have ever had, anywhere - this course is one of my all-time favourites. Really.

Ester: chemically inspired, organically nurtured and just damn good eating. I can see why our own down-to-earth, country-living loving fashion star Collette Dinnigan is a fan.