Deer Duck Bistro

Is it overly ambitious putting on a degustation-only menu in a suburban restaurant in a modest row of strip shops?

When I eavesdropped on a Friday night the answer seemed to be a definitive no from diners who were exclaiming with delight over each of their plates as they were delivered to the table.

Eavesdropping was easy because Deer Duck Bistro is tiny. It's an eccentric hole-in-the-wall carved out of an old shop with a decor that looks like it has been put together from pieces bought at a 19th century nobleman's garage sale.

There are unmatched chairs in dusky pink velvet or brocade, gilt mirrors, portraits of dandies in ermine robes and wigs, a deer head, gauzy curtains and Persian rugs.

The result is a warm, intimate space that feels as if you're eating in someone's living room. Which is why the food comes as a surprise.

Rather than rustic and homely-provincial French, with wine served by the carafe and family working the floor, what you get is something far more modern and serious. It's like a little bit of city dining for people who don't want to pay for city parking. Or huge wine mark-ups - it has a very keenly priced wine list and a BYO option.

Courses in the five or eight-choice menu are bumped up by an amuse bouche; in this case a shot glass of corn veloute, which was pleasant but tasted exactly as you would expect - sweet, smooth and, well, corny.

Crab with tomato, avocado, jamon and lemon "snow" comes as a little pile of sweet crab flesh with concasse tomato, a salty zing from the jamon and an oily burst in the mouthful of fish roe. Texturally and flavour-wise it's a well-composed dish.

Dish number three on our eight-course degustation knocked my socks off. I was expecting something quite different from the description of "Chinese pork belly" - a meaty, crisp glazed piece of pork, for example. Instead, this was an ethereal thing of beauty. The meat was so tender it had the texture of mousse and melted in the mouth to a sweet-salty-porky memory.

Rather than a crisp crackling, the skin was similarly velvety, reducing the dilemma of whether one should cut off and pick up crackling or persevere with cutlery and risk sending it flying across the room.

There was crackling of sorts, represented by a piece of skin that had been dehydrated and deep fried, resulting in a prawn-cracker like consistency. It's a popular technique, but one I don't really understand: why take the perfection of a piece of properly cooked crackling and transform it into something else altogether?

There was also a single, firm, sweet sous vide prawn, discs of sobrasada and paper-thin beetroot and white eggplant, but they all played understudy to this fabulous piece of meat.

As per the current trend (or perhaps they were just short-staffed), chef Minh Le comes out of the kitchen to deliver some plates.

Le opened this kitchen with owner Nicholas Cooper in 2011 then left to work at a number of other places, including the short-lived Medusa in Bardon, Organic Char in the CBD and, briefly, Room 81 at the Sofitel Gold Coast, before returning.

There is no doubt he can cook, but some tweaking is needed on the menu. For example, logically, a dish of yellow fin tuna, Thai pesto, white fungus, sea banana sand and "sea shell" (sea snails) should have come before the pork belly.

And perhaps Le needs to abandon the showy technique for the sake of it sometimes. A quinoa and maltose "sand" was gritty and not particularly pleasant, and the dehydrator probably gets more of a work out than it should.

I suspect, though, that Le is some kind of protein savant. Each piece of meat was exquisitely cooked, from a glorious piece of duck in a beautifully balanced Balinese curry sauce to the aforementioned pork and an unctuous piece of pressed lamb belly served with an olive oil soil, peas, heirloom carrots and baby corn.

The eight-course degustation not only has two desserts, but a pre-dessert; a palate cleanser of white chocolate and orange granita.

The desserts need to be pared back or one dropped completely - both a salted caramel banana with peanut butter parfait and coconut biscuits, and a chocolate forest dessert of chocolate soil, ganache, marshmallow and meringue "mushroom", tonka bean ice-cream and a whisky truffle are far too rich an endnote.

There are flashes of brilliance in Le's cooking, but it feels like he lacks confidence and there is too much trend-following rather than cooking from the heart.

When he lets go and concentrates on flavour rather than technique and pretty plating up, the results, like the duck dish, are wonderful.