The impact of honesty on the eating experience is undeniable. Seasonality and technical ability play important roles, but sentiment and a sense of truth on the plate have far greater implications.

Eating is, after all, as much about the way in which we consume food, and who we consume it with, as it is the actual food itself.

I’m talking about conviviality. The notion of sharing. Of abundance. A warm welcome and earnest generosity that deliver that warm glow.

For all the cleverness of precision food in the fairground of fine dining, nothing coddles one’s soul like simple food cooked with love.

If I were to say one thing about chef Mike McEnearney’s food, the first word that springs to mind is “honesty”.

It’s not food that’s riding unicycles while breathing fire behind a smokescreen of technique that’s too clever to comprehend. It’s food one might expect when dining at someone’s home—and it’s okay that it’s not perfect.

McEnearney captured something of this within the canteen structure of Kitchen By Mike, but although that model altered our perceptions of casual dining, it also limited his scope as a chef. There are just some dishes that don’t work in a canteen environment.

Something of Kitchen by Mike has accompanied McEnearney on his long-awaited move into the city at No. 1 Bent Street, though here the restaurant’s very structure allows him to deliver dishes that are somewhat more developed. The food is the same, albeit with one or two more steps in the process—and of course, there’s table service, too.

They’ve striped back the site that once housed Mario Percuoco’s Italian Acqua Pazza to leave a warehouse shell of polished concrete, Moroccan tiles and Tasmanian oak with communal tables, normal seating and a long bench where diners can watch the rest of the guest dining while doing the same.

There is a wonderful aura of openness. Whether it’s the genuine enthusiasm and interest from front of house staff, or the kitchen island that separates the dining room from the kitchen, it’s as if you’ve stepped into Mike’s home and are about to break bread with him.

We’ve banged on about share plates for years, but so many restaurants get it so wrong. Often dishes are impossible to share without destroying the fabric of the dish, or guests are left with mathematical conundrums like the old three pieces for two people hoodwink. It’s as dangerous for relationships as visiting IKEA.

But if ever a chef’s food was designed to share, McEnearney’s would be it.

It’s as if you’ve been invited to his house for dinner and he’s plonked plates food in the middle of the table and told everyone to tuck in. Lovingly cooked, casually plated.

Whole Port Lincoln sardines are first salted overnight then slightly blistered from a kiss from the wood-fired oven. They’re covered in a quite sweet, moderately soured sauce of tomato, raisins, pine nuts, oregano and vinegar.

Then baby brushed beets combine with thinly sliced, sugar-and-salt-cured rhubarb, waxy edamame, and sharp, salty ponzu.

Blue “slimey” mackerel cured in orange and lemon juice, fennel and dill arrives with delicately pickled endives and pistachios. The cured fennel adds an aniseed oompf.

Then cabbage stuffed with pork and chestnuts delivers the very essence of McEnearney’s ethos. He blanches whole cabbages for three minutes to relax the leaves, allowing him flexibility when it comes to fill each layer with a pork, mushroom, chestnut and thyme farce. It’s slowly cooked over night in a camp oven pot. It’s a big hug of delicious.

Whole small Shoalhaven tiger flathead arrives on a terracotta roof tile—glazed by Mike’s wife Jocelyn—an addition to some of the crockery she made for the restaurant, too. The fish is wrapped in pancetta, baked in the wood-fired oven and partnered with a neat little romesco. It’s a perfect pairing, though the fish is a touch overcooked—surprising for fish cooked on the bone.

We finish with an ensemble of desserts. A delicately light puff pastry and caramelised slivers of apple make for a killer apple tart. The chef’s nanna’s rice pudding, served cold, benefits from a dollop of rhubarb jam and honeycomb. Soused cherries and clotted cream boost a light rum baba, while saffron custard stars atop quinces softened in the wood-fired oven.

No. 1 Bent Street is a lesson in real food on a menu driven not by technique, ego or a style, but by produce and—that word again—honesty.

It’s not breaking new culinary ground, but rather reminding us to consider the heartbeat of each culture. The communal table: a place to share ideas, thoughts, moments and, of course, good food.