Jayda serves Maha's famous lamb shoulder in a sandwich

There's more than one reason why one might go to a cocktail bar, a fact I had to keep reminding myself of when visiting Jayda, the new, gloriously swanky CBD venue from Maha's Shane Delia.

The website provides an idea of what those reasons might be. The images are all high-contrast, high-saturation, glitzy in the extreme. "Meet Jayda. There's no one quite like her," the text declares over a photo of an anonymous blonde with pouty lips, a diamond necklace and a perfect manicure. You can't see her eyes, but you can read the subtext: Jayda is luxury; Jayda is glamorous; Jayda is expensive.

The IRL version delivers on all of these fronts. The interior – which is one door down from Maha – is dark, full of high-top tables and anchored by a backlit bar in the corner. Pass the bar and proceed down a short hallway to find the back room, all deep-blue velvet seating and brocade, tasselled stools and gold lamps, like a peacock that's been transformed into a pleasure chamber by a fairy witch.

Me? I go to cocktail bars for camaraderie and to see what magic our legions of fantastic bartenders have dreamt up; I'm not sure that's Jayda's vibe.

The cocktails (all $24 or $32 with champagne) are crowd-pleasers: a margarita made with yuzu and Aleppo pepper; a Manhattan flavoured with cherry and cacao. If that last drink sounds like a dessert, it's because it's basically a dessert cocktail, albeit a very grown-up version of dessert.

There's also a bellini made with pomegranate and rose, an espresso martini called "not an espresso martini", and an olive oil martini that's beautifully balanced, comes in the prettiest coupe ever and isn't quite cold enough.

In some ways, the wine list is far more serious than the cocktails, although not nearly as economically accessible. Of the 17 bottles of white wine on the list, only two are under $100, while seven of them are more than $200, topping out at $1015 for a bottle of 2017 Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey Corton Charlemagne Grand Cru. It's not an unfair price for that bottle, which I'd kill to drink if I had the cash, but for a bar designed for casual use the overall list could be far more approachable. But again, the kind of grandiosity for which Jayda seems designed is perhaps beyond my comfort level. For other customers, that may well not be the case.

The food is mainly designed for snacking. There's caviar service, starting at $160 for 30 grams, and raw oysters at $30 a half dozen. Like Delia's other venues, the cooking here is inspired by the Middle East, but it's also thoroughly modern.

By far the best bite of my evening came in the form of a kingfish and taramasalata tart ($9), an airy couple of bites of delicate pastry topped with marinated fish and creamy tarama, bolstered by finger lime. 

Tuna kibbeh ($11) comes raw and topped with salmon roe, but it's kibbeh in texture only, the flavour of the fish overwhelmed by the sharp sesame leaf in which it's wrapped.

Jayda's signature dish is said to be inspired by a treat the Maha staff make for themselves at the end of the night. The "after service sandwich" ($20), our server told us, came about because the combination of Maha's flatbread and its braised lamb is a favourite staff snack at Delia's restaurant next door.

Here, that lamb and bread, crisped in a pan, are made into something that reminded me of a Uyghur meat pie. With a jus for dipping, the whole thing was a bit too salty, but I can imagine it going down well after a few drinks.

If you go to cocktail bars for glamour, to have fun, to be seen, then this will be the place you've dreamt of. If you're a fan of caviar and have the funds for it – as well as for a few bottles of expensive wine to go with it – this is your spot.

The food is tasty and more considered than many drinks-focused venues. To my taste, there's more style than substance here, but what kind of grinch goes to a beauty pageant and complains that the contestants seem too focused on their looks?

Jayda is doing exactly what it set out to do – to be beautiful, to be fun, to deliver a certain flavour of flashy fantasy – and for the right consumer, these attributes will be more than enough.

Vibe: Rococo glam

Go-to dish: Kingfish tart ($9)

Drinks: Creative, crowd-pleasing cocktails; good, if pricey, wine list

Cost: About $120 for two (enough snacks to approximate a meal), excluding drinks

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine