The GeneralStore Warracknabeal

Behind a shopfront on Scott Street, a wheat town has acquired something genuinely unexpected: a BYO Pan-Asian kitchen that moonlights as a performance and exhibition space. The room hosts private functions, workshops, shows and exhibitions as readily as it serves dinner, giving Warracknabeal a venue that does the kind of cultural work a regional town usually has to drive for. The food is Pan-Asian and the drinks are bring-your-own; the programming ranges wider than the menu. It is the sort of hybrid, part restaurant and part gathering place, that tends to hold a small community together, and its ambition sits well outside what the surrounding grain country would lead you to expect.