Botanical

Rumour swirled around Botanical after Melbourne's definitive restaurant of the past decade took its inevitable post-Paul Wilson, post-sale slide. It was being returned to a downmarket pub; turned into boutique apartments; a brewery; never reopening.

In the end, it was nothing so dramatic. The new publican kept the name, of course. The Bot will always be the Bot, just as Spencer Street station will continue to shrug off this newfangled Southern Cross business.

But one thing computer billionaire and occasional brewery aficionado Chris Morris must have realised is this: if launching a restaurant is difficult, relaunching a restaurant tagged with the four-letter word ''icon'' can be doubly so. The decision-makers at his rapidly expanding Colonial Leisure Group must have occasionally wanted to take a gun to the weight of expectation they'd inherited.

After keeping the basic focus of the jewel in the crown in their buy-up of Cornerstone properties, the pointy end of their deliberations concerned the way forward: whether to jettison immediate claims to name-checking grandeur and start the rebuild from the ground up, or to keep plying a marquee brand, hoping to carry on where the previous crew had left off.

The new Botanical has taken a two-way bet. Design-wise, the South Yarra darling has broken with the past. It's out with the blond wood - but hopefully not with the blonde clientele; quelle financial disaster - and in with the dark side. The dining room is inward-looking rather than embracing the horticultural views across the road, which are left to the ground-level wine shop. Dark-stained oak tables, desert-red leather chairs, patterned carpet with more than a touch of the Qantas club lounge about it - it seems a lot of expense for the sum total of looking like an international hotel lobby.

Any more signs about their direction were taken care of by the appointment of Cheong Liew, returning to Melbourne after more than 20 years at Adelaide's The Grange.

Liew is one of the handful of chefs - add to the list Jacques Reymond and Tetsuya Wakuda - whose food is unmistakably his own. But the Botanical menu from the Malaysia-born fusion pioneer is perplexing, despite adhering to the neo-Melbourne way of doing things, with a bunch of small, shareable starters leading into go-it-alone mains. His food isn't exactly what you'd call fusion, although it mixes and matches Eastern and Western traditions, but the dialogue can be incoherent and the cooking exhibits occasional slips.

Oysters Rockefeller, a retro-classic recipe, lives down to expectations - the grilled spinach and breadcrumb topping is sludgy and silty. It's sad to see negative value-adding with quality oysters.

Saltwater duck - a Liew signature, $9.50 - is more successful: tender pieces of pale-pink flesh, strips of cabbage with a mustard dressing that threatens but fails to take over from the sweet but shy salty loveliness of the bird. Tender, vermouth-poached lamb's tongue with a sausage of duck giblets ($8.50) was also a winner, despite the sodium challenge it presented - the tongue is a miracle of tender-crisp contrast, albeit a very salty one.

No excuses for the Tasmanian green-lip abalone crowning discs of black scallop sausage and a sort of sugared ginger fluff ($23). The sausage - made with cream, the waitress tells us - is mushy and there's a blue-cheese whiff about a dribble of liquid lurking around the base. In a word, horrible.

Mains tend towards the busy and strange. There's plenty - too much - going on but no focus, save for the occasional reference to Liew's Malaysian heritage. Yet even these feints towards ethnicity achieve little apart from confusion.

A nicely cooked loin of pork ($46) topped with a lazy curl of salt cod, for example, with confit turnip and a moat of crushed almonds - and a laksa sauce and a ''chilli burnt butter'' pooling around the edges with all the attraction of a split sauce? It seems less the influence of Malaysia, more the past 20 years in Adelaide.

I preferred the simple appeal of a King Island marron ($52) served in the half shell - the rest of the body draped over, baked until the proteins had just set. The residual meat from the head had been harvested and turned into a mousse sitting in the upper-body cavity. The flavours are muted but the pinkish, bourbon-spiked sauce is good - surprisingly muted and a good match for the marron, although I wasn't so keen on the retro-gressive touch of serving it with a mound of rice.

The multi-tiered personality befitting the modern upmarket pub hasn't been lost in the refurb. The welcome policy of adding a $15 surcharge to drink a bottle from the wine shop is still in place. But service isn't of the standard of a place where mains cost about $44 and a selection of wood-grilled steaks average more than $60. Staff had the knack of disappearing when needed and entrees should never arrive before the wine.

There is salvation in desserts, however. Black-rice and palm sugar pudding ($15) is south-east Asia's answer to creme caramel and, like its European relation, it's unchallengingly pleasant - nutty and chewy black sticky rice and custard with a palm sugar hat, jazzed up with segments of caramelised pineapple and coconut sorbet. It all works perfectly. Better still is the rhubarb rum baba ($17), a booze-sodden wodge served with rhubarb ice-cream that might fall foul of a breathalyser and is thrillingly likeable for it.

A young chef might be hung out to dry these days proclaiming a ''cuisine without borders'' but Cheong Liew OAM has earned the right to a fair go. I've given it, twice, and walked away both times scratching my head. Despite an abundance of effort, this latest incarnation of Botanical isn't going to trouble the memory of its glory days.

Score 13/20 - No return to glory yet