Conlan's Wine Store, Port Fairy

Port Fairy spends eleven months a year being a small, composed bluestone fishing town on the Southern Ocean, and one month being entirely overrun by folk music enthusiasts. The festival is excellent. The town survives it. And when the last banjo is packed away and the campsites empty out, what remains is still recognisably itself. Fishing fleet intact, Moyne River unhurried, Bank Street unbothered. It is at 34 Bank Street, in a building that has been feeding people in one form or another since the 1830s, that Matt and Kate Dempsey have built something which naturally fits into the village. Conlan's Wine Store is a wine shop and a providore and a restaurant operating simultaneously, and it does all three without any of them getting in the way of the others. That is, if you think about it, a reasonably difficult thing to pull off.

Matt Dempsey is not a name that needs extensive introduction in this part of Victoria, though he wears the reputation quietly enough that you might not know it to look at him. He was head chef at Pettavel in Geelong before opening Gladioli in Inverleigh, which at its peak carried two hats in the Age Good Food Guide. A serious position for a restaurant in a town of roughly two hundred people. He co-founded Tulip in Geelong with Graham Jefferies, was part of the opening team at Merne at Drysdale, and at some point during all of this moved his family to Port Fairy, which made the commute to Inverleigh increasingly incompatible with the kind of cooking that earns two hats.

Gladioli eventually became Inverleigh Cellar and Kitchen, a looser and more European affair. Conlan's came along as something different altogether. It's a place built around the idea that wine and good food and a thoughtful providore shelf can share a room without any of them dominating the conversation.

The building itself has presence. The original structure dates to the 1830s and was thenVictoria Hotel for much of its early life. What the Dempseys have done with it is keep the bones and strip back the noise. Expect exposed brick, warm timber, wine shelving that functions as both storage and the room's primary architectural statement. The retail bottles line the walls and cluster around a central display, and the whole arrangement means choosing wine for dinner involves a short walk to the shelves rather than a negotiation with a list. You pick up the bottle, have a look, put it back or take it to the table. The corkage arrangement means the retail price is what you pay, which is either a generous gesture or a quiet act of subversion against restaurant wine margins, depending on your perspective. Both, probably.

The food is where Dempsey's training asserts itself. The menu is compact and changes with the seasons and with what's available locally. Features like Great Ocean Ducks, Shaw River Buffalo Cheese, fresh prawns and whiting from the local fleet, dairy from Gippsland. Small dishes, larger dishes, nothing structured in a way that forces your hand. The cuttlefish is delicate and splendidly cooked, the kind of thing to reward the diner who pays attention to texture. A burrata with whatever vegetable is doing well that week is the sort of starter that looks simple and requires considerably more thought than it lets on. The slow cooked lamb shoulder, which needs forty five minutes (and the menu says so upfront), is the dish that appears most consistently in what people remember about the place. The forty-five minutes is worth it. The lamb arrives yielding and dark and properly seasoned.

The gnocchi is hand made here and has the right weight. Light enough to interest you, substantial enough to constitute a meal and takes well to whatever sauce Dempsey is running alongside it at the time. The barramundi, when it's on, is handled cleanly, skin properly crisped, the plate built around it rather than buried under it. For dessert a combination of berries, marshmallow, and honeycomb is the kind of thing that sounds cheerful and tastes better than cheerful. There's enough acidity in the fruit to keep the sweetness in line, and the honeycomb does what good honeycomb does, which is shatter at the right moment and add texture without adding weight.

Kate runs the floor and the front of house with the confidence to make it look effortless. The service here is not the stiff attentiveness of a formal dining room. It is genuinely warm, knowledgeable about both the food and the wine, and paced in a way that suggests whoever is looking after you has thought about when you actually want things to arrive rather than when the kitchen needs to send them. It is the kind of service that regional restaurants often aspire to and rarely deliver as consistently.

The wine selection is the other story. The shelves stock a range that skews local and regional. Henty and Grampians producers feature heavily, alongside Victorian bottles that you might not encounter in a city restaurant list, and a considered selection of French and Italian wine for those whose tastes run that direction. The prices are retail prices, which in a restaurant context is unusual enough to mention twice. A bottle that costs $45 off the shelf costs $45 at the table. If you have strong feelings about restaurant mark ups this will either delight you or make you briefly suspicious that something is wrong. Nothing is wrong. It's just a different way of thinking about what a wine store and restaurant can be.

There are limitations worth being honest about. The room, for all its charm, is small and on a busy day the noise level can make conversation require some effort. The kitchen is similarly compact, and the forty-five-minute lamb isn't the only thing that benefits from patience. If you arrive with a fixed schedule in mind, Conlan's is probably not the right fit. It is a place for an unhurried expereince, which Port Fairy as a whole tends to encourage and which Conlan's in particular seems designed around.

Port Fairy gets a reasonable amount of attention for a town of its size, largely because it has managed to hold onto its character while accumulating a small cluster of genuinely good places to eat. Conlan's is the best argument for why that reputation is earned. Dempsey cooks with the kind of restraint that only comes from having cooked at a significantly higher level and choosing, deliberately, to do something more accessible, more rooted in the place he lives, and more useful to the town than another fine dining destination. The result is a room that earns repeated visits, a wine list that rewards curiosity, and food that is considerably better than the Great Ocean Road in general has any right to expect from its restaurants. Which is, for Felix Marrow, about as close to a compliment as it gets.

Price Mains $35-$55

Bookings Always wise, especially for dinner.

Good for wine drinkers who love a great price, and food lovers for local produce

Not for those in a hurry or on their way somewhere with a deadline

Parking Plentiful

Felix Marrow eats on his own dime. No restaurant reviewed here was contacted in advance.

Conaln's Wine Store is at 34 Bank Street, Port Fairy. Vic

https://www.conlanswinestore.com.au/

Open 10am daily, Dinner Tues - Fri from 5.30pm

Images supplied by Conlan's Wine Store