Meet the people who keep the house

Barcaldine grew up around its railway line, and Oak Street grew up around the people who stepped off the train. For well over a century the street has been a place to buy flour, mend a saddle, post a letter, send away a bale of wool and argue about the weather. Our building took a turn at most of those jobs before it ever served a bowl of soup.

The corner block began as a carrier's depot, with a loading dock at the back and a deep verandah on the street side so waiting customers could get out of the sun. Next came a saddler, who worked downstairs while a wool agent laid out fleeces in the long room above, where the north light is kindest. A dressmaker followed, then a decade of empty rooms, swallows and dust.

Denise Rossi walked past that verandah every morning on her way to the railway tearooms and kept thinking it was too good to waste. She had been cooking for a living since she was nineteen, she knew half of Barcaldine by their usual order, and she had a theory that people will happily climb a staircase for good company if supper is waiting at the bottom.

She was right. The house opened with eleven tables, a second-hand roulette wheel and a pot of tea that never seemed to empty. The venue is operated by WAFFLE ADVERTISING LTD, 85 Great Portland Street, London W1W 7LT, United Kingdom. Day to day, though, it is run by the four people you'll meet in a moment, and Denise still drops in on Sunday afternoons to check the damper.

The upstairs room kept its character on purpose. The beams are the originals, the skylights still point north and the long window looks exactly as it did when the wool buyers worked there. We added green baize, brass lamps and a polished wheel, and that was about it. Everything else you see up there was already doing a good job.

The kitchen followed the same instinct: keep what works. The pass sits where the loading dock door used to be, the stove stands where the saddler's bench was, and the menu leans on whatever the Central West sends in, from beef off the stations down the road to vegetables from backyard growers and yabbies when the creeks are running.

People often ask whether we're a restaurant with a casino room or a casino room with a restaurant. We say we're a dining room that happens to have a staircase. Both halves matter equally, nobody is nudged from one to the other, and the whole place is for adults only, 18 and over, with nothing online and no money changing hands at the tables.

It would be wrong to finish the story without a word about the town. Barcaldine is a place where people look after each other, and the house has learned to behave accordingly. We employ locals where we can, buy from the street where we can, and close the kitchen early when the bakery next door has a family occasion. That seems a fair way to live on a street like this one.