Dig a Pony

Sometimes, when chefs get fed up with 100-hour weeks, high-profile restaurants and complicated food, they head to the 'burbs, strip it all back and remember that they love cooking after all. That's what's happened to Mark Briggs, once head chef at Vue de Monde and named The Age's Young Chef of the Year while at Sharing House, a South Wharf restaurant that flared briefly, then fell in a heap last summer. Briggs hung out a bit at Dig a Pony, a bar near his Yarraville home, and when owners Mike and Hannah Bacarella found themselves in need of a chef, Briggs lent a hand. Six months later, he's still there. Even better, he's having fun.

Briggs has turned an unambitious tapas offering into an exciting yet still approachable menu of tasty snacks and share plates. There are drinking nibbles like the cauliflower ''popcorn'' (fried florets), served in a paper bag with roast garlic aioli. Other dishes chime with Briggs' fine-dining background though they rely more on good produce and proper cooking than pomp. Crab meat is served with avocado puree and tomato salsa: it's relaxed but luxe. Raw tuna is dressed with dehydrated orange powder and served in a tiny cone. Steak tartare comes with beef and condiments tumbled together; cooked yolk puree stands in for traditional raw yolk. Snail spring roll with thick lettuce puree is a winning escargot-for-beginners dish. (We should eat more snails: they're dense and earthy and not at all freaky.) Desserts are pretty: I liked the meli melo of blood orange (a ''bits and bobs'' arrangement of cake, ice-cream and fruit) but a deconstructed Violet Crumble was out of whack, with a violently violet-scented ice-cream that overpowered the chocolate ganache.

The food is way better than you'd expect from the look of the place. The two-storey 1870s hotel, built from local bluestone, is handsome but the interior has a low-key lounge aesthetic that doesn't quite find the chic in mismatched. The heart is there, the polish is pending.

Still, everything on the menu strikes me as a bargain so there's not much to complain about.

Next Saturday, November 30, Dig a Pony is running a 1980s' inspired Good Food Month dinner. Start looking for your legwarmers as soon as you book in.

Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 5)