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For some people, eating alone is a joyous adventure. They love sitting in a corner nook, soaking up the buzz, slurping spaghetti and sangiovese. Or perhaps they are a bar percher, paging through a book with one hand and elegantly chopsticking dumplings with the other.

But for many of us, eating alone is tricky and triggering, a conspicuously asocial experience. What if there was a restaurant that understood all this?

WeLive 2.0 is set up especially for solo diners. It’s surprising and solicitous: “Alone doesn’t mean lonely” is their sweet motto.

There’s nowhere else like this. Slip through a discrete doorway, up a staircase, through a curtained entryway and you’ll find yourself in a unique restaurant, with 34 timber dining cubicles, set up in rows. In front of each guest, there’s a gas burner for DIY hotpot and a roller blind that’s raised by your server to deliver food and drinks.

The food draws on all kinds of influences. There’s finesse and creativity from head chef Jason Chow (ex-Grossi Florentino and Society) and development chef Leonardo Zhang, who previously led the kitchen at excellent Auterra Wine Bar.

Owner Charlie Chen grew up near Shanghai but he often spent his holidays in Japan, where his uncle ran a ramen shop. He came to Australia as a student and worked as a chef at regional fine-diner Brae and classic French restaurant Philippe.

All these experiences feed into WeLive, but there’s another key motivator. Chen often felt like eating hotpot in Melbourne but he didn’t always have a friend to eat it with: sadly, most restaurants wouldn’t cater for him as a singleton. WeLive 2.0 is his welcoming retort.

The QR-code menu is sprawling but hotpots are the centrepiece. There’s sweet and sour tomato soup, subtle Japanese sukiyaki broth, light and lemony tom yum, and slow-cooked lip-smacking chicken soup. You can order wagyu, seafood and vegetables to cook in your chosen base.

There are also gorgeous snacks. Smoked Dutch cream potato is hidden under vanilla yoghurt foam. Wagyu “lollipop” is decorated with beetroot glaze. Nori crackers, snow peas and saltbush are arranged like a crunchy sculpture.

‘Alone doesn’t mean lonely’ is the restaurant’s sweet motto.

Solo diners don’t usually get to try others’ food, so WeLive 2.0 rewards repeat visits, not least so you can marvel anew at the well-provisioned bathrooms. (Let’s just say that if you have an undies crisis, you can solve it here.)

Other delights include kimono rental ($20), so you can take swish selfies in situ, and a wish wall where you might announce your deepest desires in pen and ink.

You could actually come here with another person because the walls between the cubicles are retractable, but I love it solo. It feels serene, cosy and meditative, a place to revel in each moment.