St Kilda diner will put a Spring in your step this Summer

St Kilda is almost back together again, just in time for summer. Stokehouse is unfurling from the ashes, with its new fish and chipper and casual diner Pontoon. Acland Street is no longer a pile of rubble, but freshly paved. Backpackers can be found drinking Pure Blondes while getting sunburnt on the beach once more.

At the end of this strip on Barkly Street sits Spring and Summer, an optimistically named diner with a pro-drink agenda and broad appeal menu. It's a business model you've possibly come to recognise as Chris Lucas Lite.

White walls gleam. Tiles sparkle behind a bar ready for tropical cocktailer-y. Nooks are lined with floral cushions that add a country home and garden element to an otherwise straight mod diner design.

To be clear from the outset, Spring and Summer won't try you mentally. Chef Peerasut "Golf" Laovanich has done time at Kong, Chin Chin and Hawker Hall. It's a menu embracing Japan, Korea and Thailand indiscriminately.

Snacks see school prawns, chicken wings and barbecued corns paired to exotic mayos. You'll probably start with a bowl of fried lotus crisps dusted in Japan's seven flavour pepper-sesame-mustard condiment shichimi. You know the drill.

But with the apocalypse nigh, you're probably perfectly primed for a Hawaiian Kona beer, gigantic mojitos (here given an almost dental twist with Vietnamese mint) and a menu that won't make you think too hard.

So. Pork ribs, soft centred and finished to a deep char (a little on the extreme side in places) are nicely offset by a fish sauce-fragrant dressing, and a roast chilli relish.

Fans of tempura-battered soft-shell crab can get their kicks from a dish featuring the crustacean sprouting skywards from a mild coconut and turmeric curry base that somehow reminds you of that curried rice classic, kedgeree, despite the lack of haddock, rice or eggs.

Laovanich wields a confident hand with the fish sauce and fragrant herbs. You can order a whole bowl of funkily dressed coriander. Make that a condiment, rather than a salad. The duck liver and chicken larb gai is nicely dressed too, and would be an exciting dish were the overly lean mince flecked with chewy offal richer to make a textural trinity in crisp lettuce cups.

Staples, if you were to use beer terms, are more "sessionable lagers" than "wild IPAs" on the complexity scale. You might plough through the tangy, chewy Korean-inspired stir-fry of gummy rice cake, tofu and sweet apple, and a house specialty of fried rice flecked with chicken and egg, but you probably won't remember them.

On this point, my highly enthusiastic waiter and I probably disagree. This optimistically named restaurant is optimistic in nature too. Everything is "awesome". My success at ordering a beer does not pass without high praise. It's a little like being served by a children's TV show presenter which is all well and good so long as it's backed by things like remembering to the bill.

Then again, we could use all the Spring, Summer and sunshine we can get right now.