Rosheen Kaul’s Pop-Up French Asian Bistro Stays Put

Chinoiserie is essentially a fantasy. The highly ornate, Asian-influenced art style, primarily associated with porcelain, furniture and other luxury objects, originated in the 17th century and is based around an invented image of what Europeans thought East Asia was like. At Little Rose, chef Rosheen Kaul takes this idea and applies it to a new context: food.

“The menu at Little Rose is built around a kind of culinary chinoiserie,” she says. Though Kaul flips the perspective and interprets “classical French cuisine through an Asian lens.”

Kaul, a cookbook author and former head chef at Etta, is one of the most exciting names on the Aussie food scene. In 2024, she took up residency at Bar Bellamy, cooking a series of collab lunches with top chefs including Yiaga and Vue de Monde’s Hugh Allen and Zareh’s Tom Sarafian. She followed it up with Bistro Marigold, an Armadale pop-up restaurant that was her first step in marrying French and Chinese cuisines, imbuing the resulting dishes with a dreamy, romantic feel.

Little Rose launched on May 9 in the former Alta Trattoria space, which recently hosted pop-ups from Pipis Kiosk and Sydney pasta spot Ragazzi. It’s “a more undone version of what I was cooking at Bistro Marigold”, she says. Originally a pop-up, the restaurant will close for a light renovation that will draw design influence from the art deco movement as well as Belle Époque Parisian cafes and 1920s Shanghai salons, before permanently reopening on Thursday August 20.

Everything is à la carte and the menu format of entrees, mains and desserts mimics that of a French bistro rather than a Chinese restaurant. Start with a Vietnamese-style baguette – more akin to a roll you’d find at a banh mi shop than at a boulangerie – served with whipped pâté butter, pickled shallots and birdseye chillies, then move onto an entree of panisse (chickpea flour fritters found in southern France) zhooshed up with white sesame and spring onion oil.

For mains, there’s a take on andouillette, “one of the most controversial sausages in French regional cooking.” as Kaul describes it, made in collaboration with Meatsmith. The Little Rose version uses slow-cooked pork skin, bound with liver in place of the traditional intestine and tripe. Plus, a vol-au-vent-inspired “chapeau of golden puff pastry” covering sauteed oysters and oyster mushrooms with glazed spring onions, sitting on a white-pepper-forward sauce au poivre.

Joe Jones, formerly of Romeo Lane and the excellent pop-up bar at Mecca’s Bourke Street flagship, who joined Kaul for Little Rose during its pop-up days, will not be involved in the restaurant moving forward. 

This article was originally published on May 11, 2026 but was updated on August 3, 2026 to reflect the fact that Little Rose will open permanently from August 20, 2026.

Little Rose
Ground Floor Rear, 274 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
(03) 9417 0526

Hours:
Wed to Fri 5.30pm–11pm
Sat midday–2.30pm, 5.30pm–11pm
Sun midday–2.30pm, 5.30pm–10pm

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