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There’s a photo on my phone from the early days of Society. It shows a wide white plate with eight small bites of food; pairs of raw prawns, cured ocean trout slices, raw scallops atop crumpets, and crab in pastry shells topped with radish – it looked like a tray of canapes that a server at a high-end wedding might have carried, right around the time it needed to be replenished.

I used to show this picture to people as a kind of party trick. “How much do you think this cost?” I’d ask. No one ever guessed right because the answer was $125 – about the price of a full dinner at many other restaurants.

I dined at Chris Lucas’ ambitious fine diner in 2021, shortly after it launched, and then promptly lost its executive chef. I remember sitting in the room with its fortress-of-solitude icicle-like chandeliers, gauzy grey drapes, and dark velvet banquette seating and thinking: Who is this restaurant for? It had no sense of place; it could have been in Las Vegas, New York, or London, which was perhaps the point.

It was full of business people and wealthy international tourists, the kind of folks for whom bland luxury perhaps stands in for comfort – it’s certainly familiar. It represented so much of what I and others resent about a certain brand of fine dining. Some of the food was good, all of it was very expensive, and little of it was particularly remarkable apart from that expense.

In the years since, I’ve spoken to many people who have come away with similar impressions, which helps to explain Society’s drop in rankings in this publication from two hats in 2022 to one hat in the most recent Good Food Guide.

I rarely write specifically about rankings in these reviews, partly because the conversation around scores and hats distracts from the substance and context of the full review and partly because those scores ought to speak for themselves. But in the case of Society, a restaurant built for the hats it hopes to wear, this up-and-down movement deserves some direct acknowledgment. I have not been the reviewer doling out the scores for Society in the past two years, but I understood them and, based on my experiences, agreed with them.

Given all of the above, I was shocked and delighted to discover during recent visits that Society has morphed into a very good restaurant. It still trades mostly in lavish ingredients done well, and it’s still very expensive – though executive chef Luke Headon has set up the expense in ways that often seem reasonable.

Take the mud crab ($95.50), steamed in the kitchen, and then prepared tableside, the sweet meat mixed with smoked bonito consomme and spiked with ginger, lemongrass and coconut. Yes, it’s basically a hundred bucks for an entree for two, but it also feels generous in its own way, the resulting bowl enough food for you to gleefully spoon heaping mouthfuls of crab meat into your maw. Not only that, the crab is delicate, the accompanying flavours perfectly calibrated – eating it is a wholly joyful experience.

At lunch, a spanner crab tagliatelle ($38.50) also delivers generous amounts of crab meat swathed in lobster oil and a lemony sauce, the pasta cooked perfectly, the whole dish flawless.

It’s possible there’s less ambition in this version of Society and more focus on really nailing those luxury items. A few weeks back, I had one of the best steaks I can recall having in Melbourne, a grass-fed rib-eye ($84.50) with mustard jus, accompanied by a simple gem lettuce salad ($19.50) with parmesan and soft eggs. These two dishes could make a fine meal for two at Society’s bar, and they’d cost less than that seafood platter of yore.

You can still get small seafood bites, but they’re priced individually and sized accordingly. They act as lovely intros to a meal here – the glistening prawn tart with blood orange and macadamia ($19.50) is a standout.

I was delighted to discover that Society has morphed into a very good restaurant.

There are still fripperies and ways to easily run up the bill. When I asked about a few wines in the $130 range, the sommelier quickly pointed me to some things I might enjoy that cost three times that amount. (And $300 is still on the low end of this list, but man, the really expensive stuff here is thrilling in its exclusivity.) Do I really need caviar on my ice-cream sundae ($29.50)? I do not.

Which brings us back to the question: Who is this restaurant for? It would certainly make an impression if you were wooing clients on the company card. Special occasion? Sure, especially if the goal is indulgence more than novelty. And yes, that class of international tourists for whom money is no object will feel utterly at home here.

But it’s not my job to judge the why and for whom of a restaurant. Rather, the question is how well it does what it does, whether it works, whether it makes sense. And these days, Society is doing exactly what it was built to do and doing it very, very well.