There are two sides to Streets of Hyderabad, a small, ambitious year-old Indian restaurant tucked away in an unassuming row of shops in the lee of the monumental Murrumbeena Station flyover.

On the one hand, it's a please-all-comers place with standard Aussie-Indian restaurant items such as saag paneer, lamb rogan josh and butter chicken. There's nothing wrong with these staples but they don't flutter the heart of owner Srini Kondaveeti. His passion is the food of his native Hyderabad, a southern Indian metropolis, and those dishes are the ones he would love you to try. Look at the Vanta Raamudu (village cooking) and biryani (rice pilaf) sections of the menu to find the treasures.

Biryani styles change as you travel the subcontinent. In the Hyderabadi version, the rice is barely coloured on top, then the closer you get to the chicken (or mutton or vegetables) at the base, the darker and more intensely flavoured it gets.

Clever, structured cooking is required. Chicken is marinated with fried onion, yoghurt and a spice blend concocted and dispatched by Srini's mum, Jyothi (cardamom and black cumin are the top notes).

The chook is buried with half-cooked rice, then a layer of 70 per cent cooked rice, and finally a layer of almost-cooked rice. That stratified package is sealed and cooked so the rice becomes consistently fluffy and the colour seeps slowly upward. It's a subtle art, allowing appreciation of rice, spice and meat in varied weight and power.

The thali (weekends only) is an array of small dishes. It changes frequently but you can always expect little pots of stir-fry, dal, lentil soup, spicy stew and a sweet.

My green bean stir-fry was magnificent: fragrant with coriander and coconut, spiced with the special guntur chilli that Kondaveeti's uncle mills in Hyderabad. It's a powerful, fruity beast, only used in south Indian recipes.

Hyderabad was ruled by Nizams (Muslim kings) from 1724 until 1948, and much of the food shows influences from where Pakistan is now, and further to the Middle East. The haleem is in that category. If I say goat porridge, maybe you won't throw yourself at it, but if I reframe it as a sturdy spiced grain stew with fall-apart shredded meat, are you open to seduction? Barley and wheat, ghee-amplified spices, slow-cooked goat: it's a spoon by spoon love affair.

If you must have chicken curry, take a brave detour from butter to try reshmi with its silky cashew cream gravy rounded out with charcoal-smoked ghee. Or if you want something nuggety, the sweet-sour-hot chicken 65 is a glossy treat.

The two-strand offering at Streets of Hyderabad is a little confusing: as well as a bifurcated menu, there are two different signs at the door, one saying Vanta Raamudu. That false wall will be smashed when Melbourne supports more south Indian specialists.

But the food? That's easy: it's honest and delicious.