There’s a certain relief to encountering a restaurant like Marmelo. I adore familiarity as much as the next person, but there’s nothing quite like sitting down in a room full of energy, vibrating with that fresh-restaurant buzz, looking at the menu and realising: Oh! This is something new.

Marmelo, from Ross and Sunny Lusted, is focused on the food of Portugal, a cuisine that you can find sparsely scattered around the city in its classic and fast-casual forms (if you look at Portuguese restaurants on Tripadvisor, for instance, all the top spots are taken by various locations of Nando’s).

But Marmelo is something different. The look and feel and cooking are modern, using local produce and Australian creativity to interpret a tradition that itself is a kind of alchemy: the blending of foods from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas. Flavours and techniques picked up along spice routes and paths of immigration and melded into something new and wonderful.

The cocktails on Marmelo’s list feel new: a gimlet made with fig, not too sweet and not too weird; smart and elegant. The wine list is full of Portuguese and Spanish things, Canary Island things, and wines you want to know about (and staff are very happy to assist you in this knowledge). The non-alcoholic drinks are some of the best I’ve had in Melbourne.

The large L-shaped room sits under the Melbourne Place hotel, and it feels like a swanky hotel restaurant but in all the right ways. The high-ceilinged wood and brick space is given a sense of movement and continuity with the swish of a snakelike light fixture that curls throughout the room, while Portuguese tile accents and a prominent still life painting of a quince (the restaurant’s namesake – “marmelo” means quince in Portugese) softens the space.

There’s a downstairs bar called Mr Mills that’s much broodier, and serves a short snack menu that has some similar elements to the upstairs offering while avoiding replication.

The full menu at Marmelo is an ambitious document, offering dozens of dishes ranging from bread and butter to an 800-gram rib-eye steak. But most of the magic here is thanks to the focus on seafood, be it tiny cubes of swordfish in olive oil skewered with caperberries and grilled peppers, or a whole market fish of the day.

“Most of the magic here is thanks to the focus on seafood.”

I was bowled over by the raw garfish, folded into compact ripples along a skewer and topped with apple and vinho verde vinegar. The firm flesh was astoundingly sweet, not fishy in the slightest, and beautifully tempered by the acidic elements in play.

Raw fish is a real strength here overall – a generous round of yellowfin tuna and vegetable escabeche with bottarga cream was light and almost fruity, the lean freshness of the fish in perfect harmony with the other elements.

Picked and shelled spanner crab is piled atop nata – a small tart, made in this case from celeriac. Croquettes are made with Murray cod instead of the traditional bacalao, and while the creamy mustard sauce gave the whole dish a lovely opulence, I wish I’d been able to taste the cod a little more.

Rather than take the easy way out and give us another raw kingfish dish, the kitchen here instead puts a fillet over fire, to great effect. Kingfish is very good cooked! More people should do it!

When I’m asked about my favourite food, I tend to say “rice glop,” which covers many genres and is almost always good even if it doesn’t have the most poetic ring to it. Marmelo is a very good place to get your rice glop fix – particularly with the addictive tomato rice, which comes as a side and is exactly what it sounds like – rice cooked in tomato broth with extra tomato for fun.

I also loved the arroz de marisco, which is basically the Portuguese answer to paella, albeit a little … well, gloppier (in a good way). It comes with “grilled, poached and cured seafood,” whatever is fresh and on-hand that day. My serving had half a marron, some mussels, and a few prawns, and was exceptionally delicious, though $165 (for two) seems a bit steep.

Food is, among other things, edible history, and I can’t help appreciating the nerdiness of the Lusteds for putting a 19th-century dessert on this menu – one in which pork fat features heavily. The Pudim Abade de Priscos is like a caramel flan, but made with far more egg yolks, as well as bacon, though the meat lends only to the richness of the result.

Marmelo is one of the more exciting restaurants to open in Melbourne in recent memory, not solely because it’s avoiding the playbook of what’s obvious and popular. The service is good! The food is delicious! The space is so fun! There’s a bunch of Madeira to drink!

Newness is almost always exciting, but when it’s backed up with real quality, that’s where the magic lies.