Kangaroos in Paris?

'Eighty-five percent of people come for the kangaroo,' says Jean-Paul Bruneteau.

They don't mind the smoked emu either, particularly the way he serves it - thinly sliced, with his version of the classic Caesar Salad.

Our conversation wouldn't sound incongruous in Balmain or Toorak, but we're discussing Aussie bush tucker in Paris, in Bruneteau's restaurant, the Bennelong. Outside, on Boulevard Henry IV, Citroens and Peugeots race by, plunging towards the whirlpool of the Place de la Bastille, just fifty metres up the road.

Though it only opened a year ago, Bennelong is already making a name on the savagely competitive Parisian restaurant scene. At lunch that day, every one of its thirty-two places was filled, and when I went back for dinner a week later, people without reservations were being turned away.

Paris has a floating Australian population estimated at about 2500. There's an Australian book shop, another selling souvenirs, and some Aussie theme bars. You can even take boomerang classes or learn to play the didgeridoo. But it's not Australians who patronise the Bennelong. In fact, I'm probably the first person from Down Under to visit the place in weeks. It's Parisians who are making the restaurant a success.

And, as Bruneteau says, most of his clients order the Australian specialties on his eclectic international menu, in particular his signature dish - kangaroo rump, seared rare on a very hot char grill and dished with a reduced stock of veal and lamb, seasoned with Tasmanian pepper berries. He serves it with spinach and New Zealand sweet potato.

For dessert, many opt for another of his creations (invented for the 1998 Tokyo Cooking Festival, where it won a medal), a soft omelette variation on the traditional Pavlova, flavoured with passionfruit.

But, while they'll tuck quite cheerily into a plate of snails, local gourmets probably aren't ready for his pan-fried witjuti grubs, stiffened with an injection of garlic-flavoured egg - one of the few dishes in world cuisine which specifies a hypodermic syringe as kitchen equipment. Bruneteau is philosophical. 'Bush tukka is a suitcase I haven't opened yet,' he admits. 'I'm still only using it sparsely.'

Parisians have taken a few months to get the measure of Bennelong. 'They're conservative,' Bruneteau concedes. 'Originally we had "Cuisine MediterrAsiatique" - "MediterrAsian Cuisine" - on the window. But, being a made-up word, the French didn't read it or understand it. I changed it back to "Australian Cuisine".'

Aside from kangaroo and emu, the menu runs to calamari, rack of lamb, a roulade of marinated aubergine, a lasagna of spiced carrot - dishes that, despite their tweak of Australian flavour, could be Greek, Turkish, even Moroccan. 'It's not about hats with corks on them,' says Bruneteau. 'It's about bringing a quality meal back on the table. To show the French that the Australians have a very healthy respect for food.'

His partner Paul James runs a business that imports the natural ingredients for his dishes. So far there's only a limited call for lemon scented myrtle, Tasmanian wild pepper or quandongs, but, only a decade ago, root ginger, okra, shitake mushrooms and fresh coriander were just as rare in France. Now they're staples of most supermarkets and greengrocers.

French-born, Bruneteau came to Australia with his parents in 1969, when he was thirteen. After training as a chef, he spent six years with the Australian Merchant Navy, ending up, at 23, as the youngest Chief Cook ever to have been in charge of the galley on a merchant ship. Back on land, he opened his own restaurant, Rowntrees, in 1982, in the outer Sydney suburb of Hornsby. Already an enthusiast for indigenous ingredients, he also compiled TUKKA: REAL AUSTRALIAN FOOD, which won the 1996 Julia Child Cookbook Award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals in New York.

Riberries, his next place, in Sydney's Surry Hills, featured Australian ingredients. Tourists loved the cinnamon-flavoured riberry, Lemon Myrtle, bunya nuts, quandongs and kangaroo meat, but locals weren't so sure. An eating public that embraced Thai, Indian and Chinese food, all of which used ingredients indigenous to those Asian nations, fought shy of food flavoured with Australian spices and fruit.

Bruneteau won the accolade from Point de Vue magazine as the 'young founding father of Australian cuisine' but in 1999 Riberries closed. 'After seven years behind the stove,' he said, 'it was me who conked out, not the restaurant.'

With the Olympics looming, he escaped the expected deluge of new restaurants around Sydney, most of them doomed to fold as the last tourist climbed onto his plane. Joining the celebrity chef circuit, he guested at hotels and restaurants all over the world, creating new dishes, and spreading the word about Australian cuisine to a sceptical cooking establishment.

Nowhere more sceptical, of course, than in Paris.

To Parisians, most of them apartment-dwellers and busy professionals, a restaurant is their dining-room, office and club. They meet, entertain, make assignations and do business there, clinching deals, as the saying goes, 'between the pear and the cheese.'

In a city notorious for pigeon-holing people by the way they dress and speak, or where they shop, the restaurant you patronise becomes part of your griffe - your signature. Friends, business acquaintances and lovers will assess you on where you take them to eat.

Pot au feu and cassoulet? Provincial and old-fashioned. Are you by any chance still living with your mother?

Couscous or Chinese? Reminiscent of student days and Cheap Eats. Grow up, my boy!

Bœuf Matignon and Poires Bourguingnon a la Dijonais? Ah, now you're trying too hard.

But Indian curry, Mexican burritos, Thai prawns, or Australian kangaroo… Hmmm. Maybe there is more to this person than we thought.

Bruneteau began his Paris invasion at the Wooloomooloo, diagonally opposite where the Bennelong now stands. Roomy and white, it never quite worked as a restaurant - it's now a trendy cafe called Baz-art - and Jean-Paul acknowledges that the Australian element became increasingly perfunctory.

'It was set up to promote the Australian wines that the owner was importing,' he says. 'But the French didn't take to the cuisine. It had to be "Frenchified" to suit them. The place deterioriated into a run-of-the-mill bistro.'

Looking around for a place of his own, Bruneteau noticed the typical French bar across the road. Coffee, beer and snack meals had been sold there since the building was constructed in 1830. A century of Gauloises had turned the pressed-tin ceiling a rich mahogany, the cedar floor was stained grey by generations of spilled beer, and the kitchen and toilet didn't bear thinking about.

But it had…something. The terrace, for instance, was just a platform with half a dozen chairs and tables, jutting out onto the footpath, but a big plane tree shaded it, dappling the afternoon sun that shone in from its western aspect. And there was character in the main room, with a central column which, after various wreckers hacked it without effect, had acquired a photogenically 'distressed' surface.

Fortunately, just as the Wooloomooloo was closing, les huissiers - the bailiffs - seized the little bar for non-payment of taxes. The government sold it off for half a million francs; A$125,000. And, no less fortuitously, Bruneteau found a backer in American investor Claudia Brown who, with her husband, put up the half a million, plus another 2.5 million francs (A$650,000) to transform the bistro into the Bennelong.

'We wanted something clean, fresh, open - the Australian way,' says Bruneteau. It took six months to achieve it. Most of the work he did himself, ripping out the asbestos insulation, re-tiling the old cave, replacing wiring and plumbing, and creating a small wine servery at the back of the main room.

Looking for an ethnic Australian look, Bruneteau didn't make the same mistake as the Wooloomooloo. 'White is fine in a hot country. It looks clean and cool. But in France you need warm colours.' The walls became deep crimson, black, mauve. Mixing water paint and natural pigments, he smeared it on the walls of the servery with his own hands. It took three weeks to dry, but the result wouldn't be out of place on a cliff face in Kakadu.

For the tables, he wanted solid natural wood, but didn't expect to get it where he did - from a giant California sequoia that once stood on the estate of his friend Edouard Cointreau, maker of the famous liqueur. When Cointreau had to fell the century-old Redwood after the hurricanes of two years ago, he let Jean-Paul cut slices through the trunk for his tables. Redwood, however, really is red, and the table tops, after being sealed with acrylic, came up a blushing pink - which, fortunately, has since deepened into a rich amber.

For the rest of his furnishings, Bruneteau and Brown didn't have to go far. Ten minutes' walk away, an old brick overhead railway line has been transformed into the Viaduc des Arts, a landscaped promenade running above busy Avenue Daumesnil, with showrooms of designers and decorators in the arches underneath.

Browsing these shops, they spotted the work of Cyrille Varet, a self-taught designer and sculptor who'd furnished restaurants in New York and Europe.

Varet's thrones of twisted metal, with plush seats in purple, crimson and green, struck a chord in Bruneteau. The curls and spirals of his metal work echoed the angularity of Australian native woods, and his fabrics mimicked the way Australian light shifts the spectrum towards the blue - reds becoming purples, yellows turning green, blues reappearing as bruised plums. Varet, as Bruneteau and Brown discovered, had been a metal sculptor until Australian painter David Bromley inspired him to enter this new field. His work makes Bennelong one of the most distinctive restaurants in Paris.

Decor, of course, won't save Bruneteau if his place doesn't catch the Parisian imagination. And in a business where almost 20% of every Euro goes in TVA, alias GST, even good food is no guarantee of survival if it can't be produced at a competitive price. Nor is Bastille, despite the proximity of the Paris Opera, a prime area for eating out. An approving notice in one of the important guides like the Gault-Millau or a good review in Elle or Marie-France could tip the scales between being assessed as branche (plugged in, switched on) or un bide - a dud.

As if on cue, a Central Casting Parisian fruit and veg. man in rumpled denim and a battered cap trundles a hand cart through the door, loaded with fresh lettuce, herbs and haricots verts, still peppered with earth from the garden where they were picked that morning.

Bruneteau's eyes light up. He may be Australian by education but it's a Frenchman speaking when he extols the materials of his work. Whatever the problems, for a restaurateur there is no place like Paris.

'I've never had such sweet strawberries, juicy pineapples, ripe bananas, ripe tomatoes. No hydroponic lettuce. Six kinds of butters to choose from. No margarine in sight. It's food heaven here, really. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous food.'

John Baxter is PTEE Dean of Faculty in Paris. Join us on a PTEE "Untour" and see the view from John's balcony.