Traditional dishes sing at Melbourne's Old Beijing

A few hours before heading to Old Beijing, I look at the menu online. It's 66 pages. Gulp. Glossy pictures take up a lot of space but still, it's a lot to get a hungry head around. Having stood outside the huge restaurant in the QV shopping centre and marvelled at the bustling machine of it, I knew I needed a strategy.

Page by glorious page – past duck, dumplings, seafood, wagyu, veg and mock meat, dishes both traditional and avowedly modern – I make a shortlist of items that are either chefs' signatures, characteristically Beijingese or jolt my reviewer spidey sense (as in, they look interesting).

Then, sitting in the 200-seat restaurant that opened in May last year, I workshop my choices with our waiter, who is unsurprised by my annotated homework sheet. She makes one addition: "You need more meat."

Teppanyaki cumin lamb is added to our banquet.

Peking duck ($45/$75) is a must. Old Beijing has a dedicated, barrel-shaped, duck-roasting oven on show in a special kitchen where birds are hung and dried to ensure the skin ends up glassy. Like many dishes here, the duck is served on a timber podium, making it feel like an event. Accompaniments – pancakes, cucumber, spring onion, rockmelon and plum sauce – are also presented with a sense of occasion. The meat is juicy, the fat perfectly rendered, the skin burnished: it's a box-ticker.

For just $5 extra, you can add two more courses of duck delight: a stir-fry of shredded meat with beanshoots, and a slow-cooked, collagen-milky broth with tofu and cabbage.

Honestly, the duck triple play could be a meal in itself. But the other 65 pages beckon … Xiao long bao ($15.80 for eight pieces), pleated dumplings encasing soup and minced pork, are paragons of the genre, but I'm even more enamoured of the pan-fried pork buns ($14.80 for five pieces) with their thicker dough casing and crisp-fried base. 

Shanghainese radish pastry ($13.80 for three) doesn't sound decadent, but these furled puff parcels filled with shredded daikon are outrageously rich and enjoyable.

More modishly, a crab and mango melange is delicately dolloped into pastry tartlets shaped like upturned top hats ($20.80 for six). Garnished with flying fish roe and arranged on an arty, caged platter, they're the froufrou dancing girls among the snacks, but a bit mayonnaise-y for me.

Traditional dishes sing. The Four Seasons cold platter ($29.80) is a conceptual prance through the Beijing year in the form of hawthorn berries, black fungus, osmanthus jelly and drunken chicken.

The steamed three egg ($26.80) is a scoopable, savoury custard made with fresh chicken eggs and studded with pieces of century egg (preserved in an alkaline mix that turns the white to salty jelly and the yolk to funky paste) and salted duck egg (firmed in brine). Gently seasoned with soy, it's a beguiling dish that demonstrates sensitive cooking.

Zha Jiang Mian ("fried sauce noodles"; $17.80) are a Beijing bedrock. Springy wheat noodles are presented separately with glossy, fermented bean and pork ragu, lightly pickled cucumber, chopped radish, beanshoots and green soybeans. The idea is to toss everything together and get slurping. Think of the passion an Italian might have for Nonna's bolognese and you'd be approaching the fervour for Zha Jiang Mian, which has countless variations and evokes endless love.

The lamb we were talked into was great, too. Calling it "teppanyaki" makes the dish sound Japanese, but combining lamb and cumin is northern Chinese orthodoxy, from Xinjiang in the north-west all the way to Heilongjiang in the far north-east. Meat strips are fried until they're almost crisp, then presented on a table-top grill. The flavours are a fantastic melding of smoky sizzle and fragrant spice. The servings are generous and the food is poised and accomplished.

Old Beijing does a great job of offering both prestige dining and democratic eats. Service leans more to the functional and efficient than warm and explicatory, but everything rolls smoothly. The tiered dining room touches on elements of the hutong (Beijing-style alley) with dashes of imperial red-and-gold grandeur.

Multigenerational families spin a lazy susan laden with pan-fried buns. Parents with prams swing by early for steamed fish and rice. Business suits settle into private rooms with baijiu (a fierce spirit), truffle dumplings and lobster. Take-a-chancers line up, hoping to snare a booth for braised pork.

QV is thriving, its mostly Asian restaurants thronging. Old Beijing is a happy inclusion, carving its place into Melbourne's culinary story, one delicious duck at a time. 

Vibe: Bustling and grand Chinese

Go-to dish: Peking duck ($45 half, $75 full, pictured)

Drinks: Cocktails with Asian flavours, prestige wine list, baijiu for the brave

Cost: $100 for two, excluding drinks

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine