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You’re in a restaurant, there are waiters and chopsticks, but there’s a big obstacle between you and dinner. You have to catch it. That’s the idea at Fishing Season, the Yunnan-style seafood restaurant with a large pool for Murray cod and eel on the ground floor, and a dining room with tabletop hotpots up above.

Choose eel or cod and you’ll be handed a net and pointed to the right part of the tank. The best technique is to spot your prey, swiftly thrust your net underneath, then whoosh it upwards to secure your meal. It’s then taken away for speedy dispatching. If you’re not feeling your inner hunter-gatherer, the friendly, well-drilled team will be happy to snare dinner on your behalf.

Spot your prey, swiftly thrust your net underneath, then whoosh it upwards to secure your meal.

The simple but cheerful dining room has bulky tables, each of them concealing a compressor that aims high-pressure steam at the base of a bluestone hotpot. The segmented fish is added to the pot, followed by mushroom-studded fish broth, then a conical straw hat is set on top. The steam does its fierce work, cooking the fish and turning the soup into a collagen-milky, rich, sticky medium in a few minutes.

Not feeling like fish broth? You can select instead a spicy soup, grain porridge, or a herbal concoction with ginseng, jujube and goji berries that is best with the eel.

My Murray cod was soft, sweet, mild (and bony – fillet-only fans beware). A set menu is recommended to reduce overwhelm and make the most of the broth. Snacks include wagyu tartlets, fish skin chips and springy, squiggly noodles made from barramundi mince. They’re all nicely rendered.

Once you’ve finished your fish, you’ll have seafood and vegetables added to the broth as a second chapter in your soup story. Condiments including XO sauce and chilli are available at a sauce station.

Dessert is forgettable matcha sponge and ice-cream. Next time I’ll head a few doors down to shaved ice specialist Sulbing for a bingsu bonanza.

This stonepot fish is based on the traditions of Yunnan in south-western China but this is a contemporary restaurant, brought here by James Li, who has similar businesses in Shanghai.

The innovative steam engineering reminds me of stories from the 1950s of the first espresso machines landing in Australia. Viewed with suspicion, and requiring a boilermaker’s licence to operate, they slowly became ubiquitous. I wonder if steam-powered cooking will follow a similar trajectory.

Fishing Season is a splashy spin on paddock-to-plate dining (the team has a fish farm in Dandenong) and will soon open a branch in Box Hill.

If you find the journey from creature to meat troubling, it won’t be for you. If your inner fisher has awakened, make a booking.

Cost: Set menu for two: from $228