A buvette can really be almost anything, so long as it’s small, French and it serves drinks. Tight train station counter cafe? Refreshment stand at a market? Tiny neighbourhood bolthole doling dusty bottles of Noilly Prat? All buvettes. Potts Point’s La Buvette meets those criteria: it’s small, it’s French and it serves drinks.

With just nine bookable counter seats on the inside (with room for 30 walk-ins outside), La Buvette is intimate. The room is just wide enough to fit a pool table, but you wouldn’t be able to play without hitting the walls, so the kitchen and counter are a better use of space. It’s the smallest space Nathan Sasi and his long-time partners Morgan McGlone and wife Sali Sasi (Bessie’s, Alma’s, Bar Copains) have worked with yet.

Although La Buvette invites the perennial bar-or-restaurant debate, its Parisian food menu is just too seductive to resist for long. Escargot in Cafe de Paris butter. Parisian gnocchi in mushroom cream. Gougères piped with comté custard. Tartlets, saucisson, baguettes with butter, and oysters with champagne granita. Steak au poivre. Pommes frites. So many French culinary classics, punched up with enough bistronomic verve – and affection for the source material – to make them feel refreshed and exciting.