Meet the inner-city Perth wine bar with serious fine-dining pedigree

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Two dollars doesn’t get you much at a restaurant or café these days.

A frozen drink at the drive-through, perhaps. Or a couple of alt-milk surcharges, maybe. If you’re friendly with your local fish and chipper, you might be able to convince them to sell you a single potato cake. (Or potato scallop. Or – God help you – potato fritter.)

But if it’s a Sunday and you’re bending the elbow at Yeah Rogue, two dollars is
enough to get you a couple of golden roast chicken croquettes: plump pillows of
bechamel studded with chook meat, breaded then fried, and served with a tiny
saucer of pale gravy. You dip. You bite. You win.

These croquettes were one of four items on the bar’s most recent $2 Sunday
Sundowner snack menu. I had planned on reporting on the other three bargain bites on offer – an olive, pepper and cheddar gilda, natural oysters, plus a fried square of gnocchi filled with sugo – but by the time I got to Yeah Rogue in the early evening, clued-up eaters had pounced and the kitchen had sold out of most of its Sunday specials.

Admittedly, Yeah Rogue isn’t the only venue in town where one can score great
snacks on the cheap. (Two-dollar oysters, for instance, also make cameos at Si
Paradiso on Sundays, and Lawson Flats on Friday afternoons.) But its Sunday
offering clearly exemplifies what this pop-up at Bar Rogue – the Beaufort Street wine bar opened in 2021 by Sarah and Liam Atkinson ofLe Rebelle – is about: good times at good prices.

Liam, as most eaters will know, has a knack for the snack.

And what was supposed to be a summer-long pop-up to celebrate the bar’s second birthday will be sticking around till at least the start of winter. One reason for this extension might well be because, until this week at least,
the calendar said autumn yet the thermometer still read summer. But the main
reason, I suspect, is that people across Perth continue to grapple with the rising
cost-of-living. Despite the temporary name change at Yeah Rogue – or should that be Bar Rogue? – the family resemblance between it and Le Rebelle is all too easy to see.

Smiley restaurant managers Sarah Atkinson and Jae Woods split their time, easy patter and service style between both venues. The boom-boom-bap of 90s rap follows you from one space to the other. And executive chef Liam Atkinson’s fingerprints are all over both menus.

Liam, as most eaters will know, has a knack for the snack. Over the past five years, he’s created some properly memorable plates, not least the chawanmushi with XO pippies at Ku Dining, plus Le Rebelle’s signature crab toast.

Unsurprisingly, strong flavours are everywhere on the Yeah Rogue menu, as are hospitality industry in-jokes, millennial references and spelling that’s at odds with the Macquarie dictionary.

For those unaccustomed to our man’s irreverent humour, reading the menu can, at times, feel like trying to decipher The Da Vinci Code.

But while Liam can come across as flippant, he has serious kitchen credentials. As does Yeah Rogue’s head chef Jeremy Warne, a cook that came up through vaunted Melbourne fine-diner Vue du Monde before heading over west. Since November, he’s been running the kitchen in the wine bar and bringing Liam’s ocker wine bar cuisine to life. (Or to quote one of the bar’s tee-shirts: “Snacks, Australian for tapas”.)

Sensibly, some Bar Rogue hits have been carried over to the Yeah Rogue menu and remain untouched. Think the crustless chicken skin sandwiches ($14) and the Hellenic-inspired saganaki sweetened with honey ($18). Those famous crisp-shelled lobster “tacos” have been reimagined as seafood-filled brioche buns (two for $24) that have been fried till crunchy like a hard-shelled tortilla.

While the Yeah Rogue menu stars many bread and pastry options, none are better than the Ortiz anchovy and Parmesan scroll ($9): a might swirl of croissant dough from the flour whisperers at Chu Bakery that’s been embellished with a compound butter made with capers and a sherry vinegar alongside the pastry’s headliners.

There’s also a dense disc of flatbread ($8). While the kitchen might want you and I to use the flatbread to dab at the accompanying hummus stained scarlet by a beetroot vinegarette, the flatbread’s true calling might be mopping up the fruity sauce accompanying the essential stuffed chicken wings ($12).

Maybe these wings will remind you of the legendary wings on the menu at Tra Vinh.

Maybe they’ll remind you of Le Rebelle’s post-Covid Oui Rebelle pop-up where Liam first debuted his homage to the Tra Vinh classic.

Or maybe they’ll make you give silent thanks that you live in a city where people are willing to debone chicken wings, fill them with a mousse of sweet Rottnest Island scallops, then grill them carefully till they attain juicy and smoky enlightenment.

I’ll also attest to the flatbread’s compatibility with the hauntingly good aioli riding shotgun with the barbecued lamb chop ($15) marinated in green yuzukosho: an unexpected application for the Japanese fermented chilli and citrus condiment du jour. The aioli hums with an oceanic swagger that I initially pegged as smoked oysters but turned out to be blitzed seaweed. (Note to self: add more dried seaweed to my own aioli experiments at home).

The snacks are supplemented by four main-course-style plates, although they don’t all stick their landings. The bang bang chicken burger ($25) was more satay
sweetness than the toasted sesame nuttiness I associate with Sichuan noodle dish that it’s named after. Carving rare-grilled rump cap ($40) into thick slices might accentuate the grain-fed meat’s inherent beefiness, although I would have loved a little more char and sear on the steak to counter that richness.

I have zero qualms, though, with the golden duck Maryland underscored with a plush Thai yellow curry that some might remember from Liam’s Star Anise era ($34). At first, the Asian in me was crestfallen by the absence of rice on the menu, but a side order of brittle, showstopping chips ($12) quickly reminded me that fried potato and duck are best friends for a reason. (You are, no doubt, familiar with the duck frites with Bearnaise sauce at Le Rebelle, yes?).

Not counting Yeah Rogue’s mighty stockpile of cocktails, spirits and wines, there are just two end-of-meal options on the menu, but they’re both bangers. There might be wobblier wedges of Basque cheesecake around town, but the dense lushness and citrus tang of Yeah Rogue’s version ($18) makes it another contender worth seeking out.

Perth-ish delights ($6) reworks Turkish delight by swapping out the rosewater for a mix of orange, lemon and lime juice: a clever way of using all those clean-shaven citrus fruits produced by the bar. It’s yet another example of a situation where someone else might have seen a problem, yet the Atkinsons saw opportunity to create a little happiness.