Sydney's Madame Shanghai is a corporate crowd-pleaser

There are things I can accept. The passion for all things 1990s doesn't look to be going away anytime soon. And that's OK – there's enough space between those awkward years when I thought bike shorts and pork pie hats were de rigueur, and today.

But who could have predicted the early thousands coming back so swiftly and with such force? If this modern Asian restaurant is anything to go by, they really, really are. How has this happened? Am I officially old now? The evidence certainly weighs up.

Exhibit A: the deep house and chilled beats, the ambient sound that once signified you were somewhere "cool", drinking cool drinks like "mojitos". Which brings me to...

Exhibit B: the complicated, Asian-inspired cocktails by "cocktail artist" Kate McGraw such as a briny, slightly thin and medicinal stir-down of buttered cognac, salt water, mustard seed and licorice root. I'll let the menu description take it from here: "The poets and artists oft spoke of an elevated sense of being, a free zone of production that had to be unlocked to achieve greatness."

Exhibit C: That chinoiserie vibe that is fairly typical of a well-kitted-out Asian restaurant in just about any fancy hotel (or in this case, the ground floor of the Regency luxury apartments) just about anywhere in the world. It's a sort of cookie-cutter lusciousness that has the effect of making you feel like you're in Honkers, Shanghai or Mayfair. Those table lamps, the thick, plush carpets, the intricate scalloped feature panels, the rattan-covered ceiling fans, tables and chairs, the midnight blues, charcoals and emerald greens. The difference here is you also get stellar views over Hyde Park.

Exhibit D: A menu and wine list designed for a company-card-carrying crowd. Food-wise, nothing's really going to blow your budget or your mind, but it's all fairly pleasingly tasty, not too challenging and, if you're doing some corporate entertaining, this probably ticks all the right boxes.

Silken tofu rests on a bed of diced thousand-year duck egg, dressed with a little chilli oil, and while the addition of raw crunchy ice plant seems a little off-piste, it kinda works.

Pipis stir-fried in garlic and black pepper and pepped up with pickled chilli is a bit more like it when it comes to some solid, grounded flavour. But really, it's hard to look past a round of sticky fried tamarind pork hock, with a bowl of special fried rice. Or maybe just a few fingertip-burning lamb cutlets, rubbed in cumin and soaked in miso butter.

The wine follows a similar line of thought. The list is almost entirely comprised of bottles you can reasonably sneak through on the expense account, most hitting that $60-$80 mark), though if you want to drop some serious coin on wine here, you can.

Dessert's not really a necessity here, and if anything, it's probably no bad thing to go in for another cocktail.

How about the Spontaneous Combustion? If only for the fact it's the only time I've seen the phrase, "a crowning achievement of Chinese science" on a cocktail menu. I rest my case.

Bottom line: Silken tofu ($16); lamb cutlets ($8 each); pork hock ($19).