$150 for an entree? The verdict on Melbourne’s newest, and grandest, dining room

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That $240 seafood tower. Those $200 to $400 steaks. The many, many $300, $500 and $3000 bottles of wine. $35 cocktails. Look folks, Reine is not for the faint of heart (or wallet).

It’s appropriate, perhaps, that this newest project from the Nomad Group and chef Jacqui Challinor should be so unapologetically ostentatious, given its location. The former Melbourne Stock Exchange, with its gothic design, soaring ceilings and gargoyles on the facade, is basically a church, but for capitalism. (It has often been referred to as a “cathedral of commerce”.) There are even stained-glass windows depicting scenes of the type of labour that kept the Victorian economy going in the late 1800s, when the building was completed.

Across a courtyard sits sister venue La Rue, an eight-seat wine bar with a look that’s far more modern Melbourne. The juxtaposition forms a fantastic partnership of past and present.

Walking into the space is positively breathtaking. There may be no other restaurant in Victoria with an interior this grand, this dramatic, this ostentatiously beautiful. A room like this almost demands that you throw caution and good economic sense to the wind, and order the lobster, the wagyu, the caviar, the champagne.

Challinor bills her menu as “modern French”, though it’s a genre that might more accurately be called “New York French”. The cues on this menu – the luxury seafood, the multiple cuts of high-end beef – are taken more from American versions of the grand brasserie than they are from the original French format, which tends to be simpler and more traditional. Nor are they taken from truly modern Paris restaurants, which all but reject the trappings of tradition.

Does it matter that much what inspired the chef when the foie gras and duck liver parfait ($28) is this fluffy, this decadent, like salty, savoury buttercream? It’s a dish so ubiquitous these days, and yet Challinor’s version had me swooning, and typing notes like “sex mousse” on my phone.

The southern rock lobster cocktail ($150) presents the sweetest, bounciest lobster meat served over its shell on a platter of ice – one of the world’s great indulgences done right and without distraction.

Duck cassoulet ($45) is perfectly seasoned, rich and warming, with slabs of duck neck sausage on top that ramp up the funk and flavour of the dish beautifully. Not much of anything here is done without exacting calculation; nothing is left to chance. Innovation isn’t the point; familiar luxury is what Reine is all about.

That’s true for the steaks as well, which range from a 180-gram onglet ($65) to a Robbins Island sirloin (200g, $185), to a one-kilogram Blackmore wagyu rib-eye ($420). They are all cooked with that same exactitude, the wagyu (which also comes as a 250-gram scotch fillet for $165) so buttery and opulent it’s an exquisite torture to try to finish it.

There was only one dish during my visits that disappointed, and that was a dessert: a ruby grapefruit semi-frozen parfait situation ($24). I wish there was more love for grapefruit in Australia, but people tend to be turned off by bitterness, and this dessert did nothing to assuage that concern. Where ruby grapefruit can often be wonderfully sweet, especially when bolstered by sugar, the very pretty confection was more bitter pith than fruity wonder.

It’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve struggled to find a bottle of wine within my taste and price parameters (old-worldish; under $130), and even longer since I’ve been upsold on a bottle by more than $50. That was during my first visit to Reine, a meal that took place at the oyster bar, which runs down one side of the space, when I was effectively facing the wall. The service that night was a bit too cavalier, not quite polished enough for the setting or price tag.

Another night, when seated in the dining room (a much harder booking to snag, but so much better for luxuriating in the magnificence), sommelier Callie Poole guided me to an incredible bottle of Domaine Dupasquier from Savoie in the French Alps ($125). Poole showed all the charm, knowledge and enthusiasm I might expect to be reserved for diners ordering far pricier options.

It’s a bold move to open a restaurant so exceedingly expensive in the midst of an economic downturn, and whether that gambit is tone-deaf or hopefully celebratory will be in the eye of the beholder.

But Challinor and crew have done something that, in the long run, is almost certainly worth celebrating. They’ve taken one of the grandest rooms in Melbourne and made a restaurant worthy of that grandeur. Long may it reign.