Is the third time a charm for the Saint in St Kilda?

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Even 24-hour party people have to grow up eventually. The first time I visited the Saint Hotel it was the early 2000s and food wasn’t high on anyone’s list of consumables. The second time came a decade later, in its disco Thai phase. Now, after standing empty for a few years, it’s entered its third act as an upmarket pub-slash-brasserie where you might fancy kicking on in the glam cocktail bar upstairs following your $95 crayfish pasta.

Re-zhuzhed by new owners into an approximation of a fancy Tribeca steakhouse, the multi-level venue is anticipating a changing of the seasons for poor old Fitzroy Street.

The quintuple lures of Saint Dining, front bar Saint Bar, terrace bar Bar 54, and a yet-to-open wine bar and a listening and cocktail bar are a bunch of shiny things being dangled before a style-conscious Melbourne demi-monde with ADHD and cash to splash.

It’s a lot to take in, but we’re here for the dining room. Set at the ground floor of an atrium hemmed in by red brick and walls of glass, it’s a self-referential world of interconnected booths, where black marble tabletops are lit by tiny lamps and banquettes are upholstered in kid-soft leather – a sort of modern Copacabana, where going to the loos means promenading above the fray along a glassed walkway.

The occasional flash of flame comes from the world’s most discreet open kitchen. That’d be the Josper wood oven and grill, a fancy bit of kit that justifies its expense via executive chef Gary Lai (The Atlantic, Amber Hong Kong) adding its smoky, charry, real-cooking touch to just about every dish that passes through, from a single jumbo king prawn ($16) with sweet flesh holding its own against fermented chilli, to dessert where smoked ice-cream adds a spiky note of intrigue to a deconstructed apple pie ($21).

Even the kingfish crudo ($28) gets a whirl, the excellent firm-fleshed tiles of fish bearing the gentle hallmark of wood smoke. A Melbourne entree cliche lifted into a dish of lilting loveliness, it sits in a pale tomato consomme with nasturtium leaves and sea succulents that combine into an impressionistic wash of freshness.

Table bread isn’t a thing here, predictably. Instead, for $11 you get a lovely puffy, garlic-oiled and griddle-marked flatbread with smoked salt. It’s emblematic of a place in which you get what you pay for, although the sleight of hand gives me the pip with the skewers: priced singly on the menu, it transpires they can only be ordered in pairs; like magic, that $12 starter becomes $24.

But the impaled proteins hit their KPIs with meat as charry and juicy as you could want. Grunty octopus ($24 for two) gets a romesco-esque sauce tuned up with fried capers, while chicken oysters ($22 for two) with egg-yolk emulsion (let’s call it mayo) and nubbles of crisp skin are so tender and smoky I’m tempted to order another round, only don’t because that would mean two more.

Service is hardest to get right during a quiet shift, when underutilised-slash-bored waiters standing around an empty room can make it feel like an awkward house party. There are some dropped stitches – it would be good to know straight up what the fish of the day is, for instance – but ask and ye shall receive informed guidance on the food and especially the wine.

It’s a good list, too, a rock-solid document put together by someone whose love of the devil’s juice shines through a by-the-glass section that includes a Barossa Valley frontignac and a Tassie cabernet among its road-less-travelled drops.

Mains double down on the Saint’s modus operandi of accessible yet smart, technically sound cookery. You can feel confident dropping $64 on 300 grams of grass-fed Scotch fillet despite knowing it comes blushingly naked. It’s juicy, flavour-packed, the poster steak for medium-rare perfection. Fries are $11, while sauces, including herbed butter, are $4 each. They’ll throw in mustard gratis.

And that pasta, with its curly ribbons of malfadine twirled around Apollo Bay cray meat in a buttery bisque sauce with just a touch of chilli, along with cherry tomatoes and fried basil leaves? The plate is decorated with the creature’s shell (like that koan about the tree falling in the forest, not only does crustacean need to be eaten; it needs to be seen to be eaten) and at $95 I’m tempted to ask to take it home, but the dish is also generous and rich enough to be foolhardy to tackle alone.

So keep your friends close and your credit card closer. Enough said, really.