Kyo Kim has been working radicchio hard at Beaconsfield Wine Bar: a bitter sheath for beef tartare seasoned with garlic and soy, made in a kitchen that had been working at close quarters. After owner Matt Sharples closed the wine bar in Perth's south for a two-week makeover, Kim returned last week to a bigger, redesigned kitchen with new equipment, more hot plates and more fridge space. Kim, who started as head chef last year, now has more room to move the hot food program beyond pasta.
Sharples has shifted the dining room with the pass. New window counter seats give solo visitors a clear place to land. Bookshelves hold food and wine books. Built-in ledges take bottles and small objects off the tables. Upcycled bentwood chairs are now part of the room's furniture. The changes are modest in scale, but they sit exactly where service pressure usually gathers: at the table edge, beside the glass, between the next plate and the bottle already open.
Why Sharples Built the Bar to Move
Sharples built the bar with movement in mind. The latest iteration keeps that original looseness, but gives it a more settled frame.
"When we first opened the bar, we had no idea where it was going to go so we designed it with the intention that things could move around and change"
Matt Sharples, owner
A neighbourhood wine bar earns regulars by being useful before it becomes loved. It needs a seat for the person having one glass and a snack, a table for the group ordering widely, and enough working surface for food and bottles to share the same evening without crowding each other. Sharples' new ledges, counters and shelves respond to those habits rather than dressing the room from the outside.
"The bar has sort of grown up and become what it is now."
Matt Sharples, owner
Sharples now makes more tables available to book, while most of the bar's 50 seats remain set aside for walk-ins. That balance matters. It gives guests making the trip to Beaconsfield a way to reduce the risk of arriving to a full room, without turning the bar into a reservation-only dining room.
What the Renovation Changes for Kim's Work
Heat is the hinge. In a wine bar, hot food depends on infrastructure before it depends on appetite: holding, finishing, warming, pacing and recovery when a room orders in waves rather than courses. A better-equipped kitchen gives Kim more ways to manage those pressures, especially in a place where guests may graze, return to the menu, then order another plate because the bottle is not finished.
Before the makeover, Kim sent out small plates including tagliolini with Shaoxing wine and tofu parfait. Those dishes, alongside the tartare already working radicchio's bitterness against soy and garlic, show a cook placing broader logic inside a wine-bar portion. The move is not about making the venue heavier. It is about giving Kim enough range to meet the room without falling back on the same register every time someone wants something warm.
Sharples' dining room alterations do related work. The window counter changes how the bar absorbs solo diners. Built-in storage keeps the eating surface clearer. The shelves put wine and food books within reach of the room. These are hand-level changes, the sort a guest feels when the next plate arrives and there is somewhere for it to go.
How Kim Can Push Her Cooking Further
Kim now has a wider station from which to define the bar's food. A cramped bench can make a dish feel shaped by necessity; a larger kitchen asks more directly what the cook wants to make. That is a sharper kind of responsibility, because better tools expose intention.
Kim's cooking so far points to method rather than theme: seasoning used with precision, bitterness treated as structure, texture asked to carry pleasure without relying on a familiar protein cue. Those choices suit a wine bar because they do not demand ceremony. They ask for attention, then get out of the way of the glass.
In this room, expansion for Kim does not have to mean larger plates or a longer menu. It can mean steadier timing, more confidence when a group orders across the board, and a clearer answer to what hot food should do beside the bottles. Pasta remains useful because it is legible and filling. Moving beyond it asks Kim to build a broader grammar without losing the bar's rhythm.
The Feel of the Refreshed Room
At table height, the refresh is practical. A solo drinker can take the counter rather than occupying a two-top. A bottle can sit on a ledge instead of the centre of the table. A book can be pulled down between pours. The room's working surfaces now have more help.
That matters because Sharples is not simply adding polish. He is making more space for the people already shaping the bar: Sharples, who has let the room adjust as guests showed him how they used it, and Kim, whose kitchen now has the capacity to carry more of the venue's identity. The bar does not need to become a restaurant in disguise. It needs Kim's food to be fast enough for the room, precise enough for repeat diners, and flexible enough to sit beside whatever is being poured.
Other Operators Moving in Perth's South
Around Fremantle and Perth's south, other operators are shifting too. Emma Pegrum and Tom Van Beem, owners of Northbridge's Wines of While, recently took over the former Prestige Italian Cafe on Phillimore Street. They reopened it as Cafe Music, a pop-up that ran alongside Fremantle's ARRIVAL festival in June. It ran until June 6, and the future of the space is deliberately open-ended, with Pegrum saying Cafe Music may return in some form.
Canadian chef Shauna Shapiro adds another marker nearby. Known from Madalena's and Polly's Bagels, a pop-up influenced by the cooking of her Jewish grandmother, Shapiro now runs Shapiro's Shop at Ripple Brewing from Thursday to Sunday. The rotisserie chicken kitchen sells birds whole or by the quarter, with sides, a fish finger sandwich and a plant-based schnitty.
Seen beside those moves, Sharples' makeover is not a surface fix. It is a test of how much more a neighbourhood wine bar can carry when Kim has better tools, Sharples keeps the room open to walk-ins, and the work at the pass is given enough space to stretch.
