Warm your bones with Black Fire's hearty, meaty fare

We come to Black Fire predisposed to like it, having had two friends name it a favourite. And it's clearly doing something right to stay busy among the overstuffed Braddon dining scene. Really, the Lonsdale Street zone has little left but eateries and bars, swallowing up every piece of spare real estate. How long before that corner carwash, almost the last relic of the caryards and mechanics shops, is gone as well?

By 7.30pm on a Wednesday evening Black Fire swells into a busy restaurant. Lighting is low, the colour scheme dark, the floor polished concrete and the walls brick.

It's divided into two cosy spaces, and there's a fire with hunks of rib hanging over the smoke at the back of the room, though there's no intrusive smell of smoke.

The list of wines from Canberra, Australia more widely and Spain is brief and focused on affordable drops and big flavoured wines, which you need with this food. The glasses, generous pours, come to the table sans bottle – a failing by no means peculiar to Black Fire but common to, I would say, the majority of restaurants.

We don't get hugely attentive service tonight, and other than the bottles of sparkling and still we order when we sit down, the water is not refilled. As the restaurant starts to fill up, we have to start getting people's attention for service.

The bread, while not made in-house, is likeable, served as thick slices, lightly grilled, with good green olive oil and balsamic.

The focus is unmistakably on meat. There are vegetarian dishes, but they're not the main game by any stretch.

Berkshire pork belly ($18) is a big slab of meat for an entree, not a delicate offering, the meat is tender and easily shredded with a fork, the skin turned into a thick slab of uncompromising crackling. I like the faddle-free rhubarb puree underneath, described as "red rose rhubarb and apple", which cuts the fat and meat of the pork well.

Roasted baby piquillo peppers ($6) is a very pretty snack, two little triangular peppers stuffed with mud crab and served with romesco, which adds a gentle heat.

An entree of ciruela plums ($5 each) is unusual, and would perhaps be better suited to the other end of the meal where the soft, dessert-like texture would work well. It's a large portion of preserved plum paste, served on top of a mound of "first milk yoghurt". The menu refers to "basil and dill frites" which we're not identifying on the plate. But the "roasted house dukkah crocante" is there and it's a dense cracker tasting clearly of dukkah, robust and really the only savoury part of the dish. I'm not convinced by this addition, but it helps to mop up the plentiful and likeable yoghurt and plum paste.

We order handkerchief pasta with suckling lamb shoulder braised in four-year-old balsamic, pecorino scales ($27), expecting an Italian-style dish of pasta with a rich and clinging meat sauce.

This dish is really the opposite in its approach; it's all about the sauce – a great bowl of quite vinegary gravy, swimming with shredded meat, slices of pecorino on top, and you can fish in it to find the squares of pasta. I'm not overly fond of this dish, partly because there's no real complexity in the flavour, but also because this over-the-top meat renders the pasta a rather swamped afterthought.

We expect the slow-roasted angus short ribs to be sticky, fatty and lip-smacking, the kind of food you pick up with your fingers and eat off the bone. But they arrive in a thick sauce, too. The unusual cut of the ribs gives you large steak-like pieces of meat studded with bones and held together with the meat.The meat is likeably tender and fatty but the sauce is thin and very rich, and given the dishes we choose, we're getting a lot of similar presentation.

It's there again in the wagyu osso bucco ($26), which is a large serve, loads of meat and another rich sauce. It's hard to resist all this rich bone marrow, and while it's not complex it's our favourite of the mains. The menu promises a "taroz of mashed yellow potatoes and green beans", but it's a rather simple and tasteless white potato mash.

A side of organic carrots and charcoal pumpkin with basil pesto comes free with one of the mains. It's simple, unadorned and pleasant, the pumpkin simply cut into cubes and the pesto rather dulled by the heat.

For dessert, we'd normally head straight for the chocolate coulant, cooked to order, but we've run out of time. So instead it's organic raspberry sorbet ($5), and while not made in-house, it is good.

The torrija honey-toasted brioche with lemon mousse, ginger caramel and burned orange ($13) comes as three spongy squares of brioche with what seems to be little slices of dried lime. I think the lemon mousse might be just a smear on top but it's not clear.

The dulce de leche with brandy snaps and finger lime "caviar" ($13) is a big glass of thick sweet cream, which reminds me of caramel lollies, hard to resist and very moreish, but so rich and sweet it's not easy to get through. There's no sign of the brandy snaps.

Overall, Black Fire hasn't shone for us tonight, and we leave with the sense that the menu hasn't delivered on the promise, or the food on its descriptions. But as we said, this place has a strong following and when you visit a place once you can sometimes miss the favourite dishes that keep others coming back.