Delicate dishes by the seaside at East Bar and Dining, Mount Martha

Everything starts so well at East Bar and Dining. You find the pretty little beachside restaurant just outside Mount Martha. Parking out front, it glows out of the dark night all white and woody, full of the promise of summer cocktails on the porch. Inside, you find animal pelts strewn for winter warmth. Wicker crab traps shrouding lights bring a beachy theme. It's more modern than anything else you'll find in this part of the world. A lot more adventurous too.

Ambition drives East. You can feel it. You can certainly see it on a Saturday night when young chef Michael Demagistris​ (the ex-MasterChef: The Professionals contestant in the portraits on the wall) is pitching succulents into the sink to use the vessel for a diner's kombucha.

You already knew, from the menu on the website featuring every cheffy trend of the last three years – kimchi, cultured creams, liquid nitrogen and chocolate with beets – that Demagistris plans to revolutionise this town.

When you call, they tell you as much, explaining that while the daytime a la carte menu of familiar staples is what the locals want (you can get tomato and burrata salads; prettily plated calamari with fried capers and bresaola on house-made fennel loaf with goat's curd at lunch) it's the five- or eight-course evening degustation that they're really about. "We forage and collect the ingredients all week. It's $89 – but worth $120," they quickly explain, possibly waiting for the line to go dead.

If you come to East for an early dinner, for a time your vision of the restaurant aligns with their own. At quiet 6pm, the service that's as green as it is likeable is, if anything, a perk. One waiter carefully turns rectangle napkins to triangles like a newfound magic trick before thoroughly tucking us in. Asking if the chardonnay is oaky gets us a taste (it's not), a few questions about chardonnay and the conclusion from our eager pal that: "It is great for me to know that!" He's dead right.

Come early and you can order the navigator cocktail and get that mojito-margarita mash-up of Bacardi and tequila with lime and sorrel promptly. It's delicious.

Equally quickly come plump oysters dressed in sea succulents and shaved scallop (we don't taste the latter), perched high on a bubbly rock.

Then a kangaroo tartare which, combined with olive dust, sweet-salty miso mayo and lavosh, tastes exactly like original recipe Barbecue Shapes. I mean this in the best way possible.

Early on, it's a dream coming true for both sides of the pass. Demagistris has time to painstakingly place every carefully turned pickled vegetable around an excellent salt and pepper quail; to nitrogen-chill the glass for your kombucha with apple juice ice (refreshing); to tweak the seasoning in the day's wild mushroom risotto. Frosted with toasty puffed grains, it's a buttery, rich interlude between the pickled or chlorophyllic stuff.

Would that you could live in this fantasy all night. In spite of some strikes on the menu – our pork belly served with a nice apple puree and an OK kimchi is potently hammy, highly salty, and for my dining partner a solid chock of fat, while the heirloom beetroots with "cultured yoghurt" (so, yoghurt?) and a scarlet granita is a classic win literally soiled with a chocolate crumb (granted it's an earth-enhancing union I've never understood) – there's a lot of skill and passion here.    

We're still rooting for team East when reality comes knocking at 7.30pm. East is delicious. East can work. But East's complicated menu, being plated by a team of four, served by a green crew means that when the room fills the dream unravels. Tables in the too-cold atrium want to be moved; excited diners become frustrated ones as time between dishes stretches from 10 minutes to 40; empty cocktail glasses languish; heads loll on shoulders while staff circle tables, eyes wide.

East could be a dream, with a little wake-up call.