Sydney's new Botswana Butchery has the steak, but has it got the sizzle?

Can a restaurant be too big? Botswana Butchery seats 300 people, and there is capacity over three floors for 940 standing. Yikes. The idea of that many people will either make your heart sing, or send you scurrying straight back home to bring up the drawbridge and defer all plans for dining out.

Rest assured, the three levels of dining and drinking at Botswana Butchery have been designed to allow for both outdoor dining and social distancing. You can strategise your own level of immersion, from a quick bite and pre-dinner drink to a corporate blow-out or casual business lunch.

If you're wondering where 25 Martin Place is, it's the old Seidler-designed MLC Centre (which it will probably still be called for the next 20 years regardless). The entrance is now landscaped and terraced, fringed with bars and restaurants; the perfect spot for a business-minded steakhouse.

Enter New Zealand's Good Group and their Botswana Butchery, installed here along with two of Sydney's tried-and-true chefs, former Rockpool chef Angel Fernandez as culinary director, and Darren Templeman (O-Bar) as head chef.

Steakhouses aren't usually open to the outdoors, and the clubby vibe indoors with its squishy velvet armchairs sits at odds to the curved open terrace and greenery. But hey, it's good to have both.

And there's enough fish and seafood to make sitting in the sunshine feel appropriate, such as a kombu-cured New Zealand king salmon in a sprightly yuzu koshu dressing with stretched curds, fermented cucumber and some tickly bronze fennel ($31.95). Pleasant, without going anywhere fast.

Another entree, of caramelised ox tongue ($28.95), comes glazed with a savoury tare (Japanese dipping sauce), buried under shishito peppers and crisp, deep-fried cubes of potato. Unlike a lot of tongue dishes, it's slow-cooked until practically spreadable, and could actually do with a bit more texture.

But the steak's the thing. The Butcher's Block section of the menu offers 13 different beef and lamb dishes with options of different sauces and butters (green peppercorn, or truffle and bone marrow butter, say).

A dry-aged rib-eye on the bone is always my first choice. Here, it's from a retired Friesian dairy cow via CopperTree Farm ($95), and comes nicely crusty, sliced and reassembled. The meat is picture-perfect, but lacks the lusciousness that keeps you coming back.

Accompaniments, quite rightly, are simple – just a good beer mustard and grilled half lemon. Full points to the kitchen for tossing the bone back on the grill for a lick of heat after carving, in case there is someone at the table who wants to gnaw. (And there is always someone like that at the table, right? Oh wait, it's always me.)

Add some good, snappy shoestring fries ($10) and a fleshy 2019 Dalwood Estate Shiraz ($23/$60/$95) and you're in business.

I'm not entirely sure why the prices are pitched so high, with cocktails at $25, entrees $30 and steaks from $39 to $288. There's even the Botswana Gold experience in the Gold Private Dining Room that features a 1.6 kilogram wagyu tomahawk covered in gold leaf, for $500 a head. (Why?)

The cheese menu lists some great local cheesemakers (Holy Goat, Pyengana, Woodside), and desserts sound predictable, but aren't. Peach pavlova ($18.95) is from the wardrobe department of Bridgerton, with butterfly wings of torched meringue and fresh slices of peach floating over a firm meringue base filled with poached peach and whipped ricotta Chantilly; a touch of yuzu curd at the base for cut-through.

The rooftop bar is a sunny spot for a beer, although the on-trend wagyu katsu sandwich with caramelised onions ($27.95) I was looking forward to trying had a seam of unchewable fat inside.

Botswana is the sort of bustling, conventional steakhouse designed for the kind of business lunch or dinner that used to happen when the CBD had a lot of businesses that did lunch or dinner. At this stage, it has the steak, but we'll have to wait a bit longer for the sizzle.

The low-down

Drinks 1000-bottle list heavy on the red, with some French heavy-hitters

Vegetarian Not much, apart from salads, sides and a pasta

Pro tip Dress-circle views of Martin Place are surprisingly attractive

Terry Durack is chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and senior reviewer for the Good Food Guide. This rating is based on the Good Food Guide scoring system.