Just Open: Bar Clarine, Fitzroy

The hotly anticipated natural wine bar sidekick to Belle's Hot Chicken, Bar Clarine, opened last week. The menu will change every 10 days, and every second you spend reading this decreases your chances of a seat. The new project by Morgan McGlone, Miranda Campbell is tiny, with just 22 seats and no bookings.

But if it's small, it's also ambitious and spry, a place of minimal intervention wines and maximum fun for oenophiles who have reached peak hot chicken.

Shucking signature oysters, serving them with cucumber, bay oil and white pepper is chef Adam Shoebridge, an ex co-worker of McGlone's from Husk in the United States.

It's a wine-food menu that maintains the Southern accent of next door, though mildly so. That might look like griddled rice cakes with boiled peanut hummus; sardines on toast with a tomato gravy (cornmeal cooked down with tomatoes) or a salad-meets-cheese-plate hybrid of mignonette hearts with a malted onion dust and big curls of beaufort cheese. Other cheeses and terrines are being made in-house, while the fresh produce driving the menu is being negotiated with a farm collective in Monbulk.

Manning the wine collection (cellared off-site in Collingwood) is George McCullough, the young sommelier with strong game courtesy of time at the Builders Arms. It's an international cellar with a minimal-interventionist heart, which McGlone has been building since October, and currently features rare French cuvees and bonus non-wines like a Laurent Cazottes tomato eau de vie made with 72 types of the plant.

Open Tue-Sat 5pm-11.30pm (and later when the licence expands).

150 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, 9077 0788