STORY BY LARISSA DUBECKI, PHOTOS BY CHRIS TURNER

Memo to diners in the depths of a COVID winter: If you’re craving comfort (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) there are few better places to spend a few delightfully diverting hours than Midnight Starling.

On Kyneton’s storied Piper Street – unofficially known as Victoria’s restaurant Golden Mile - this Francophile favourite has reopened from the enforced shutdown with all its duck à l’orange in a row. The signature dish of chef Steve Rogers and his six-and-a-half-year-old restaurant, it’s something that keeps the regulars coming back. “If I took it off, I’d be run out of town,” says the 40-year-old.

That duck, in all its considered glory, is emblematic of the Midnight Starling menu. Steeped in the best traditions of French food, as befitting a chef who trained under Melbourne’s legendary Jacques Reymond, it’s a rollcall of reasons that France can claim to have spawned one of the world’s great cuisines. There’s steak tartare and duck liver parfait; John Dory in sauce Champagne and hangar steak in a bordelaise sauce.

“On our return menu we wanted to give people all the things they might have missed for a few months,” says Rogers. “It’s all about the classic French things that are just so delicious to eat.”

Rogers was born to French cooking. “I love the technique, I love the flavours, I even love the rules, despite the fact I occasionally break some of those rules,” he says. Former mentor Reymond cemented the love affair by setting his protégé up with a job at the Michelin-famous Pierre Gagnaire in Paris. While plenty of Australian chefs spend their time picking herbs in the corner during their time at world-famous restaurants then happily boast about it on their CVs, a reluctant Rogers has to be coaxed into revealing details of his two years as a chef de partie: “It was just a great couple of years.”

But back to Kyneton, where Rogers lives with wife Sarah (the chief keeper of their impressive kitchen garden) and their five children under the age of 12.

Enter Midnight Starling and be enveloped in a vision of a classic little bistro that could hail from Paris’ eleventh arrondissement, with the warm glow of wainscoted walls offset by a sharp white marble bar and a phalanx of period pendant lights. Head downstairs to the cellar, another dining space where bluestone walls flicker by candlelight. It’s a charm-pot of a place, where the drinks list is a nicely played smattering of near and far and the rule-breaking is of the most genteel sort; a panna cotta, for instance, that is made like a crème brûlée, “so you don’t have that overly eggy, heavy finish that you can have with a classic crème brûlée”.

As for that duck à l’orange, Rogers’ recipe is exacting: “A good duck à l’orange has to have the breast cooked well and the skin needs to be crisp so it’s dry-aged first for a good 12 to 14 days. The leg has to be braised and tender and the sauce needs to be complex and somewhat amazing… It’s just one of those things.”

Midnight Starling

60 Piper St, Kyneton

5422 3884

midnightstarling.com.au