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It was around the time we got our heads around controlling and understanding fire that humans really started going places. Finally! We could keep ourselves warm when it was cold. We could light up formerly dark spaces. Our ancestors could build different, stronger tools. Most crucially, learning how to control fire also meant humans started cooking food: a game-changing evolutionary step that broadened our diets, grew bigger brains and bodies and – millions of years later – cleared the runway for viral TikTok food trends.

As far as good examples of using fire to make things tasty go, it’s difficult to look past a steakhouse. While Wikipedia suggests steakhouses evolved from the chophouses of 17th Century London, it was during post-war, Mad Men-era America that the steakhouse came of age. The grandiose dining rooms full of wood and leather. The intoxicating, aspirational allure of the three-martini lunch. The expense account dining, client dinners and lunchtime wheeling and dealing. All these spoke to the steakhouse’s role not just as a place to eat, but also as a place to do business.

While I’m certain plenty of deals have been brokered at 6Head since this flash steakhouse opened in November at Elizabeth Quay, its appeal isn’t limited to business lunches. During the week, the lunchtime crowd takes in everything from suits and boots to gym bros in jogger pants rocking Nike sneakers and bare ankles. I’m reliably informed that elite MMA fighters regularly drop in for post-training T-bones.

When my predecessor Rob Broadfield wrote about the restaurant’s opening late last year, he – as well as other Perth food writers – highlighted the restaurant’s not-insignificant prices. Fair, I feel, when you’re talking about a place charging up to $370 per kilogram for steak and selling bottles of wine that cost around the same as a week’s worth of rent. The menu – caviar! Fancy oysters! – has plenty of ways to blow out your bill and invite questioning from financial controllers both at home and the office.

6Head certainly looks like it’s had money spent on it. The main dining space is a widescreen, gilded arena that’s roughly the size of a skating rink. Menus and staff uniforms are adorned with the restaurant’s logo: a figurative illustration of a cow’s head that looks like an upside-down A. A coppery curtain-slash-painted-mural wrapped around the main dining room adds some theatre to things, as does the open kitchen that huffs and puffs on the other side of the curtain.

Considering the scope of this operation, restaurant manager Jake Silver (ex-State Buildings and part of the opening team of new-wave members club Lawson Flats) has done well to assemble and train a floor team that’s enthusiastic, well-drilled and big enough to keep the 6Head juggernaut moving as staff take orders, serve guests and carve meat tableside. Unsurprisingly, beef is the cornerstone of 6Head’s food offering. While this bovine focus isn’t as ostentatious as, say, the walk-in meat cabinet-like entrance to Rockpool Bar & Grill, there’s lots of cow on the menu. Things like plates of glossy bresaola ($25; an air-dried, salted beef) that’s made for the restaurant by Wagyu producers, Mayura Station. Their rump meat is also the protagonist in a very serviceable tartare ($33) showered with wispy threads of Parmesan and freeze-dried egg yolk before being neatly tucked into a half-pipe of carefully cleaned bone. Triangles of toasted white bread complete the story.

But really, you’re coming to 6Head to eat steak. Or at least all the tables around us on the Tuesday night I visited were. If you order something on the bone, the beef won’t just be cut tableside by someone wielding a fancy hexagonal-handled Japanese knife who’ll also give you a short lesson in cow anatomy; you’ll also get the raw steak shown to you to get your approval or to ask for something bigger, smaller or with less or more fat. A nice touch, both for guests and the restaurant.

Steak prices start at $72 for a 300 gram bit of rump and climb steadily from there. 6Head also dry-ages beef in-house with its current experiments involving coating bone-in angus rib-eyes from Collinson & Co in a mix of rendered Wagyu fat and chocolate. Was the sweetness in the steak ($189) my buddy and I split a result of the choccy, the 35 days the meat had been ageing for or merely the power of suggestion? Perhaps it was a mix of all three. Steaks come with your choice of chips (those planky, square-edged McCains steakhouse chips) or salad (a single leaf of lettuce with pickled onions and a minty dressing) and sauces ($6 to $8) need to be ordered separately.

Yes, the rib-eye was not a cheap bit of meat. Yes, I’m glad – and privileged – that my employers picked up the tab. And yes, there will be people reading this that believe (not untruthfully) that you can buy terrific steak from a good butcher and cook it at home at a fraction of the cost. I, too, enjoy grilling my own steak and eating it. So long as I can carve out an afternoon to buy the meat and other ingredients; fire up the Weber; wait an hour until the coals have burned down. And let’s not get started about tidying up and scrubbing the grill plate. Steakhouses, like all restaurants, are in the business of selling experiences and charge accordingly.

While 6Head’s headliner upheld its end of the bargain, it was the performances from the ensemble that really turned my head. These were things that weren’t just delicious: they also showed off the range and technical nous of head chef Shane Middleton, a local boy who counts Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner by Heston (both in London and in Melbourne) and Fleur as former workplaces. Things like the pressed potato cakes ($19) rendered ultra-crunchy by being cooked in Wagyu fat and served with a heady truffled cream. Or the fried calamari ($22), coated in cornmeal and deep-fried until well-browned and crunchy, paired with a loose, Japanese-inspired aioli spiked with yuzu. Ironically, my best-on-ground goes to the Brussels sprouts ($19): a wonder of texture and taste starring sprouts that are blanched, then deep-fried to order before being tossed through burnt butter, fermented chilli and honey. That winning one-two of char and sweetness reminded me an awful lot of the burnt bits found in very good char siu.

Not that Middleton is all about showboating. Sometimes his cooking is about getting a lot of little details right. Take the house burger ($35). The patty – a mix of brisket and chuck – is charred and juicy; the bun is slicked with more of that Wagyu fat before its turn on the grill; plus the lettuce is shredded into thick strips to avoid the patty moving too much while you’re eating the thing. A very fine, if somewhat bougie, lunchtime hit-out.

Steakhouses, perhaps more than any restaurant, are houses of excess. You will very likely over-order and leave little room for afters, which would be a shame. Although the dessert menu is a clone of the menu designed by pastry chef Kim Van at the original 6Head that opened in Sydney in 2019, it’s up to Dina Saka and Martina Silwal – the Perth pastry team – to make sure the dishes slap. They do. The chocolate orange entremet ($20) is an elegant layered sweet singing the sweet joys of the Jaffas of our youth. The yuzu and lemon meringue tart ($22) consists of a low-rise of shortcrust pastry filled with a thick, mouth-puckering citrus curd given height by a bombe Alaska-style cloud of torched Italian meringue. Do I wish the tart- to-meringue ratio was flipped? Yes. Did I still enjoy it? Absolutely.

I know it’s crass to mention money, but with the current cost-of-living situation we’re all facing, money guides a lot of our dining decisions. Making money is also crucial important to running a (viable) restaurant. This is something that the Seagrass Boutique Hospitality Group – the owners of 6Head and other restaurant “concepts” doesn’t just know but appears to be very good at. I just wish they weren’t so in your face about it or so reliant on technology.

When you make an online booking, you’ll be constantly prodded with offers ranging from committing to a tasting menu to pre-purchasing one of the white-handled steak knives ($25) the restaurant uses. The iPad wine list feels a bit clunky and unintuitive, especially if you aren’t given clear instructions on how to navigate the filter-based interface. It’s so much more enjoyable quizzing sommelier Camila Luzzi – an engaging emerging wine professional to watch – and her team for their picks. I get it, information is power and understanding your customers is key, but I can’t help but feel that my data is being used nefariously or sold, especially when a host asks me for my phone number so she can attach it to a booking for a walk-in table at lunch.

Thankfully, hospitality doesn’t happen inside the Matrix. Once you step away from the machines and re-engage with real life, you’ll discover the real 6Head is a living, breathing thing that is all about those human touches. Sure, 6Head is about business too, but it knows how to mix business and pleasure.