Rosheen Kaul and Joe Jones’s Pop-Up French Asian Bistro Has Arrived

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 new Fitzroy pop-up restaurant 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, and will run until Sunday July 5. It’s “a more undone version of what I was cooking at Bistro Marigold,” she says.

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.

Joining Kaul is another of the city’s top culinary stars, Joe Jones, formerly of Romeo Lane and the excellent pop-up bar at Mecca’s Bourke Street flagship. 

The two are philosophically aligned. “We share an affinity for the classics – European down-the-line – but we also have the courage to use those core ideas as a blueprint rather than a rulebook,” says Jones. “It’s considerate, but loose. We’re not trying to be exact; we’re letting things breathe a little.”

Jones’s cocktail menu includes around nine monthly changing drinks plus a few weekly specials based on what’s in season, which dishes are popular and “how we’re feeling that week,” he says. The namesake Little Rose Martini is a mix of vodka, fino sherry and coconut and chrysanthemum vermouth. Two Romeo Lane favourites make appearances: the Negroni Pesca and the Black Butterfly. The former is a peach Negroni that’s “lighter and juicier than a traditional Negroni”. The latter is a mixture of vodka, coffee and cognac that Jones says has a lingering salted caramel flavour, despite containing no caramel, salted or otherwise. 

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

littlerosefitzroy.com
@littlerosefitzroy