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Included in the thesis-length manuscript I’m writing in my head, titled What is Australian food?, is a newish chapter on the ways in which South-East Asian cuisine meets local seafood in modern Australian restaurants. There’s a style emerging, one you can’t find elsewhere in the world, that relies on several factors – most importantly, the influence generations of immigrants have had on our collective tastes, and the incredible bounty that comes from our oceans, rivers and ponds.

Over the past year, for instance, fat split-open prawns, cooked over fire and flavoured with aromatics, is a dish I’ve seen interpreted from a Filipino point of view (at Serai), a Laotian perspective (at Jeow) and more.

At Firebird in Prahran, the prawns ($42) come over a layer of Vietnamese-style crispy rice, slathered with lemongrass – the dish’s deep seafood flavour ramped up with the addition of shellfish bisque. The flavours may be Vietnamese, but the presentation and ingredients make it very much of this time and this place – that is to say, modern Australia.

Firebird was opened in 2020 by the Commune Group, which also owns Hanoi Hannah, Tokyo Tina, New Quarter and Moonhouse, all in Melbourne.

The long room, adorned by plants and warm lighting, fronts an open-tiled kitchen that revolves around open-flame cooking. Originally, it was helmed by chef Steven Ngo, who has worked with David Thompson at Long Chim, but late last year it was announced Nabil Ansari would be taking over the kitchen. Ansari was previously sous chef at Sunda, had a wildly popular Indian takeaway business during lockdown (run out of his Carlton apartment) and has hosted a number of pop-up stints around town.

His menu at Firebird includes a mix of dishes that the restaurant is well known for – you can still get the scotch quail eggs ($9 each) and smoked dry-aged duck ($54/$106 per half/whole) – and new additions that are all his own.

Fat raw scallops ($10 each) are served on the shell with a mellow burnt chilli and pomelo. There’s a beef carpaccio ($25) with finger lime and charred betel leaf that pops with brightness, underpinned by the raw meatiness of the beef, and grilled noodles made from soft squid ($24), shot through with caramelised nuoc cham atop a bed of crunchy green papaya salad.

Pipis come in the form of canh chua ($39), the southern Vietnamese sour soup that sings with tamarind, charred pineapple and coriander.

If there’s any hint of the Indian cooking for which Ansari has been known, it might be in the eggplant curry ($30), which combines pickled and fire-cooked eggplant alongside fluffy rice – the curry a sweet and tangy smoosh that’s both comforting and dynamic. It’s a dish I’d come back for again and again.

Pair it with an order of wood-fired Chinese doughnuts ($6 for a serving of 4-5), which are savoury and crispy and contrast wonderfully with the soft eggplant.

The bar offers refreshing, tropical-tinged cocktails, and the wine list has plenty of rieslings and other fun bottles that go exceptionally well with the food.

Service here can be a bit wonky, with a few manager-types who obviously know exactly what they’re doing and a lot of other folk who seem downright befuddled. Cocktail orders went missing, plates went uncleared; it took forever to flag down someone to order wine. My meals had pacing issues, with multiple dishes coming out at once, followed by (very) long waits for anything else to hit the table.

And while the flavours were often fantastic, the execution didn’t always live up to the food’s promise – the smoked duck, for instance, was both overcooked and under-crisped, the meat too well done, the fat unrendered and chewy.

Some of these problems may be anomalies (indeed, the duck I saw on other people’s tables looked delicious); regardless, they are imminently fixable. The underpinning at Firebird of fresh ingredients and bold flavours is strong. This restaurant may not be writing an entirely new chapter on modern Australian cooking, but it is representing the genre admirably.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine