XO Restaurant, Canberra

Last time we were eating in this Narrabundah spot, it was home to Artisan, a really decent restaurant stuck in what always felt a rather awkward location for its relatively ambitious approach. Restaurants based in small neighbourhood shopping centres like this surely need a regularly returning local clientele as their staple customers, but Artisan was less a regular haunt than a special occasion outing.

Artisan is now gone and it remains to be seen whether the replacement eatery, XO, can fill that neighbourhood role. The new owners have pared back what was already a pretty simple set-up, with the long wall stripped back to bricks and painted white, and the dominant central bar gone, to be replaced by high seating. Our table has a look of polished concrete with metal edging, a pretty outdoorsy style and the chairs are cane. This gives a casual feel – perhaps XO is deliberately aiming for a more casual drink and snack crowd as well as the restaurant goers.

The table set up is casual, simple white Asian-style bowls, chopsticks, a bottle of house-made hot sriracha sauce, upbeat music. The feel is friendly and very accommodating, especially of our plain weird request – in at 6.30pm, three courses and out by 7.20pm to make it back to the school concert pick-up. Squishing dinner into a space like this is one of the challenges of the season, and few restaurants would cope as cheerfully as XO with such a demand. Surprisingly enough, they meet the deadline.

And best of all, they do it with very good food.

The menu is succinct – half a dozen entrees and a similar number of mains, plus small plates and sides. The steamed dumpling starter ($16) is a plate of four dumplings, Chinese style but wrapped like ravioli, with prawn and pork on the inside, a clear and fresh filling, and a "spicy soy vinaigrette" on the outside. The sauce is super-hot, but beautifully warming and not distracting from the freshness of the dumplings. These are good and would warm you from the inside in winter.

The drunken chicken ($15) in aged rice wine is a spring dish, served cold. The sliced just-cooked chicken fillet is served in an aromatic rice-wine bath with sliced wood ear mushrooms and spring onions, a delicately handled, unusually flavoured dish that we also enjoy.

Also highly unusual is the charred lettuce ($10) side dish with lemon vinaigrette. The taste is odd, with sprinkled sumac on top, which lends a savoury edge, spicy like a cookie, and the puckering lemon-vinegar flavour underneath. Weird, but it grows on us and we love the concept, just as we love the hunk-of-cabbage dish at Lilotang. XO is not part of the Chairman entourage, but feels like its aiming at the same modern, mixed-up loud-flavoured Asian in a youthful setting.

Witness the crispy lamb ribs ($29), five big lamb ribs piled up and sticky with a sweet-savoury plum sauce, a crowd-pleaser of a dish. There's a load of fatty succulent meaty sweet enjoyment in this pile.

The beef rending ($29) is gutsy, too, although feels more refined and definitely makes for tidier eating. We're told the black angus chuck has been slow-cooked for five hours, and it's definitely showing the benefits of this treatment. The spices are clearly freshly blitzed, intense and still crunchy with lemongrass, bright with chilli. This is the kind of honest, classy, well-put-together curry you'd be impressed to eat at a friend's house.

The wine list, like the menu, keeps things to the point, with a focus on well-chosen wine, whisky, sake and cocktails, not too much of any of it – other than the whiskies, perhaps, with no fewer than 17 whiskeys making the list, including some from Japan. If we drank cocktails, we would head straight to the concoction the exploits the pleasure and pain of mouth-numbing Sichuan pepper, although the description contains no hint of what else makes up the mix. However the point for us tonight is sake, and it's good to see the bottle and have a discussion about the various sake options.

Among wines by the glass are three locals – Clonakilla Nouveau viognier, Eden Road the Long Road chardonnay and Courabyra pinot noir from Tumbarumba, Nick O'Leary Riesling, and Collector Marked Tree shiraz. When you see Ravensworth nebbiolo (bottle only, $70), you know the person in charge of the wine list is switched on to the less obvious end of the best Canberra wines, and when you see Hunting on Sundays grenache shiraz, you know they're part of the emerging food scene, since this is a backyard wine made by Travis Cutler, the genius behind the Ainslie IGA deli, and a man who surely has a starring future in Canberra's food scene.

XO is a little odd in the set-up but delivers in the food and drinks, and most especially in the dessert, where the black rice pudding is one of the best desserts I've had in recent times. The coconut ice cream is dark with what must be muscovado sugar or something similar, crunchy and chewy with coconut and absolutely delicious. The rice "pudding" is warm, chewy also, and there's a crunch of startling honeycomb, which tastes like it's been made with gutsy honey. How excellent, and a great way to finish as we tear out the door, barely 50 minutes on the clock, leaving a surprised set of staff in our wake.