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The signs are good. On a brisk Saturday night, Hakka Cuisine is thronging. A family group sits around a lazy susan, chatting over claypots, dumpling steamers and a glistening platter of whole fish. There’s a couple canoodling over noodles and a bottle of BYO red. A parade of young men spills from a private dining room and heads outside for vapes and japes. Another VIP parlour burbles with a baby’s 100-day celebrations, a joyful milestone well worth a banquet. A cook with long rubber gloves extracts a live lobster from a tank and carries it in a tub to the kitchen.

The signs, I admit, aren’t good for the lobster. But if you, like me, are waiting in the foyer – and not in a fish tank – dinner feels like it will be lively and fun, as indeed it plays out.

This large restaurant is at the base of a modern building in an awkward, wedge-shaped tenancy with floor-to-ceiling windows. Other food folk have tried to make a go of it here, but they didn’t make best use of the space, or connect with the neighbourhood.

Hakka Cuisine opened last December and is doing much better than its predecessors: it’s well-organised and friendly, with a clarity of purpose. If you’re in this eastern part of Melbourne, you may agree there could be more Chinese restaurants nearby, and even if you’re not, you might appreciate Hakka Cuisine’s explicit project to teach the city’s residents about styles of Chinese food beyond old-school Cantonese and hot-and-numbing Sichuan.

Many centuries ago, the Hakka people migrated in waves from central to southern China and then dispersed to other parts of Asia, including Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and India.

Hakka food is well-travelled and, consequently, diverse, but there are tendencies towards braised meats, tofu and clear but subtle flavours that honour the original ingredients. It’s inland food for the most part, so there’s more duck and pork than fish and prawn.

The menu here doesn’t restrict itself to Hakka dishes: it roams other parts of China as well as including bedrock staples found in any classic, Aussie Chinese restaurant. If you want sang choy bao, sizzling beef, sweet-and-sour pork and tick-a-box lunchtime dim sum, it’s all available, but if I come to a place called Hakka Cuisine, I’m here for one reason.

Mild, chewy tofu skin is mixed with sesame seeds and spring onion to create a “prosperity salad” ($14.80) that connects the action of tossing with the idea of wealth, as though you’re riding waves of bean curd to success.

Glutinous rice dumplings ($13.80) are filled with a minced mixture of peanuts, pork and prawn: they’re sticky, soft and superb. (There’s also a sweet version with peanuts and sesame that I highly recommend for dessert.)

Chef Rui Chen comes in early every day to make tofu, soaking and grinding soybeans, cooking the milky juice, then steaming it with minced pork. These jiggly, creamy tofu cakes ($32.80) are a famous Hakka dish: served in a claypot, the flavours are gentle and sweet, like being softly covered by a blanket as you ready yourself for a nap.

The flavours of these jiggly, creamy tofu cakes are gentle and sweet, like being softly covered by a blanket.

Another classic dish pairs duck and taro, a starchy root vegetable ($40.80). Bird on the bone is marinated in rice wine, then slowly braised so the taro absorbs the juices and becomes as delicious as the protein.

Hakka food is not afraid of fat, and one of my favourite dishes is the wok-fried noodles with lard ($18.80), which I can imagine as a simple, after-school fortifier or cosy supper. Chewy egg noodles are tossed with fatty pork and water spinach, red onion and bean shoots. The success of the dish lies in the fragrant char on the meat and noodles: you can taste the sizzle.

Hakka Cuisine’s owners are Billy Fong, his wife, Lana Tan, chef Rui Chen and manager Ricky Cheung. Fong has been working in Melbourne Chinese restaurants for 25 years at places including Dragon Boat, now closed but a longtime mainstay of Chinatown, and for the Hu Tong group at venues including Crown’s Man Tong.

He, Tan and Chen also own nearby Shunde House, which serves the subtle food of Shunde in the Pearl River Delta lands of Guangdong, and they’ve just taken on veteran restaurant Jade Village in Mitcham, which they’ll convert to a Teochew restaurant this spring, showcasing another style of Guangdong cuisine.

Their mission is noble and necessary: to continually broaden Melbourne’s understanding of Chinese food, one burbling claypot, one sticky dumpling and one unfortunate lobster at a time.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine