The future of LP's Quality Meats is most definitely female

It might be a sausage factory but the future of LP's Quality Meats is most definitely female.

For such a narrow pocket of inner Sydney, it never ceases to amaze me what a broad collection of smoky smells Chippendale manages to produce.

There's the savour of the hearth cooking at Ester, fuelled by Aussie hardwood. The pervasive perfume of grape bubblegum from the young creatives vaping outside their studios. And, of course, the deep musk of this Chippendale curehouse just around the corner.

Old hands will remember LP's as that haven of big smoke energy. A menu with a richness so deep even a head of lettuce required a cardiac risk assessment. Where tables were communal, and the atmosphere was "the darker and louder, the better". The restaurant charter may as well have been Salt for Hours, Fat for Days.

Admittedly, it was pretty bro-centric. Even Luke Powell – the L and the P behind those Quality Meats – was a little over it, turning most of the restaurant into a sausage-curing facility back in 2019.

Flash forward through a couple of years we'd collectively like to forget, and we arrive at chef Isobel Little, fresh from a long stint in the UK, where she was last seen working the pans at the bar-diner Londoners love to love, Brat.

It feels like a new restaurant. The really big change here is a sense of warmth and conviviality. The bar is covered with perfectly ripe white peaches and bowls of heirloom tomatoes. The little general store out the front is stocked with wine, sauces, pickles, sodas and beers. The kitchen and front-of-house is dominated by women.

While the charcuterie window filled with meats at different stages of curing still has pride of place, it's not necessarily centre stage.

This might be Little's first head chef gig, but there's something extremely assured about her cooking style. The menu is led by small local producers and executed with a gentle hand.

Check out those fig halves ($5 each), so ripe they're almost daring you to bite into them just so they can explode, draped in peppery slices of cured pork loin. Or that tomato and nectarine salad ($23) with ricotta salata that's made, pressed and smoked on-site, adding brightness to proceedings.

It's not just the kitchen that's lifting, either. New floor boss Alice Tremayne, who moved from Melbourne and her job as restaurant manager at Attica to take over at LP's, has sharpened the drinks list.

Set the tone with a white peach spritz, made with the same fruit that's sprawled across the bar, and then consider moving onto a lean red from Trentino trailblazer winemaker Elisabetta Foradori.

Fleshy slices of raw bonito ($24) are dressed with mussel escabeche, the sweet acid lifted with fresh mint and cucumber. And in a cute ode to England's second favourite edible pastime (picnic food), pig's head brawn ($22) is bound with just the right amount of jelly to keep it firm but still yielding, and served with a sweet-and-sour pickled prune relish. You could probably mount the argument to serve this as part of England's first favourite edible pastime (breakfast), too.

Lynden Farm lamb ($46), however, is the real star this evening. Grown in Oberon, the lambs are raised on berries and wild herbs. Because it's such lush pasture, they spend their days getting deliciously sweet, fat and tender before they have, as the farmers say, "one bad day". Rack and rump are served together, along with a warm salad of squash, peas and mint, dressed with a sheep's milk yoghurt. The fat is so rich and sweet, it's nearly a third course on its own.

There are a couple of downers. Such is the nature of the seating arrangements at the bar (tall, skinny stools, no foot rests) that sitting there for more than an hour is far from comfortable. If you intendsettling in for the evening with the menu, and you really should, be sure to specify a seat at the table.

I would also have liked the (extremely) creamy mullet roe dip ($21) with crisp, fresh crudites of bitter greens and radishes to be served a little earlier, but hey – if the worst thing I can report is too-late, too-creamy dip and a slightly sore bottom, it's a good day. Especially when there are fresh, hot madeleines ($5 each) baked to order in a scallop shell to burn your fingers on for dessert.

The bigger take-home is that there's greater clarity of flavour, purpose and sense of cohesion here than there has been for a long time. 

The low-down

Vibe New-school diner with an old-fashioned twist

Go-to dish That incredible Lynden Farm lamb. And be sure to order smoked snow gem potatoes with hay butter ($15) on the side.

Drinks A fun wine list including wines by niche female producer and Trentino trailblazer Elisabetta Foradori.

Pro tip Take home some of the excellent house-made pig's head sausages – they're wonderful fried and tossed through pasta.

Myffy Rigby is Good Food's guest reviewer for International Women's Day.