Picture perfect: Courgette

As high end restaurants fight to be louder and more brash, heading to a classic fine dining venue of recent past has become a bit of a treat. These days, it feels indulgent to enter a space with soft furnishings, hushed tones, linen tablecloths and low lighting.

Courgette, on Marcus Clarke Street, is exactly this. James Mussillon's modern European restaurant has been around seemingly forever, and continues to serve up elegant dining in a quiet part of town.

The door is opened for you, your coat is taken and the lounge-like chairs seem to embrace you as you settle in. The main dining area feels far removed from the road and ambience outside, with a large glass window instead looking out into a calming courtyard garden.

Dinner is a four-course set menu for $88 (three-course lunch $66), with two options for the first course, and four for the rest. Wine, which is housed in a cellar off the side of the foyer, is served by the glass, half bottle, bottle or magnum. Selections are predominantly Australian and French, with a heavier selection of Italian reds by the bottle.

Courgette is a spot for special occasions, and everyone is asked after they're seated if they're celebrating something. Warm, crunchy bread rolls are also quickly served, which provide a nice vessel to enjoy the lusciously smoked butter waiting on the table. It's butter that's so good, we go through a second helping.

Everything that comes out of the kitchen tonight is picture pretty, with accompanying flowers and artfully arranged dollops. 

A salmon and scallop ceviche salad is an interesting dish to start, and there's a lot going on on the plate, which is similar to all of those to come. The fresh seafood slices are topped with avocado, yuzu sesame seeds, puffed rice, tiny cubes of baby beets and coriander. It's the sort of dish where every mouthful brings something a bit different, but they're flavours that work superbly together.

While the dish works well, the implements to eat it with don't so much. Aesthetically, Courgette's cutlery is a perfect match for the environment – sleek, modern and slender. But the very elongated handles and small heads make eating with them a bit cumbersome; the exaggerated length literally requires moving the chair further out from the table to cut comfortably. 

The seared blue marlin steak comes on a cauliflower puree and topped with micro greens, chorizo crumb, and fermented black garlic which adds to the dish but allows the seafood flavour to shine through.

The vegetarian option, the tomato tarte tartin, is a beautifully caramelised and flavoursome tomato on a crispy pastry base with basil, resting on sticks of asparagus and accompanied by a generous amount of goat's cheese. The goat's cheese could perhaps be slightly warmer to bring through the flavour more, but overall this is a really good dish.

Third courses are more substantial. Tender pieces of venison are served with a sweet port and thyme jus, which nicely cuts through the richness of an accompanying truffle mash. Juicy lamb sits on a bed of bean puree, with a tasty sweet prune gel and rosemary jus, and a couple of vegetables balancing on top.

For dessert, the salted caramel walnut terrine is combined with apple and malt for a sticky dessert which is a touch hard to cut through, but served with a lovely cardamom ice-cream.

Tonight, the restaurant is particularly filled with couples, and it's undoubtedly a date night spot. Maybe for a third or fourth date at a minimum though – four courses is a lot to sit through if they're not quite what you hoped for.

A lot of thought undoubtedly has gone into every dish, and Courgette is just the place to linger over lovingly put together food in a restaurant that is unashamedly old-school fine dining.