Sure, cheese has its champions and chocolate has its ’holics, but in terms of visceral, decadent pleasures that border on the carnal, pork crackling is damn near unbeatable.

Like mainlining salt and fat to deliver a dopamine rush, this gloriously onomatopoeic crown to a Sunday roast is an easy win for the home cook and restaurant chef alike. Which is to say a shop specialising in the stuff (a) is onto a good thing and (b) better get it right.

Enter Mr Crackles, which for years has been serving Sydneysiders late-night food to sop up the booze and recently opened its first outlet here.

In a utilitarian concrete box of a room with all the appeal of a public convenience but with added blaring hip-hop from lunch through to very late (3am on weekends), you’ll find as much crackling as your heart desires.

Sadly, it’s rubbish.

Boxes of the stuff wait under a heat lamp for their next victim, holding so much promise but delivering disappointment in powdery-dry, tasteless facsimiles of the good stuff.

Unfortunately the rest of the offering – a range of meats in roll or on salad – fares no better. Piled high with chips, cheese, roasted pork and doused in gravy, The Bogan, for instance, doubles down on dude food but is such a mess you’d have to be a post-midnight mess yourself to consider it.

Char siu pork is no improvement. Meat that’s mainly fat in a sickly-sweet glaze served on a dry ‘Vietnamese’ salad that’s mainly cabbage shows little respect to ingredient, culture or diner.

With a ‘cult’ reputation that precedes it, Mr Crackles is, of course, packed with the young who don’t know better. But in the words of the middle-aged couple next to me surveying their half-eaten salads among the detritus of prior diners, “Well, that was a waste of 30 bucks.”

I couldn’t agree more.