Denmark. The land that’s given us Hans Christian Anderson and Travis Fimmell in fur. Lego for our kids, sails for our Opera House and a crown for our Mary. And now a steak house.

In 1971 the first A Hereford Beefstouw opened on the family farm of Lars Damgaard and has since grown into a chain of 14 restaurants across Denmark, Sweden and Greenland. Lars met South Australian winemaker-turned beef farmer Tim Burvill and in 2011 they opened the first Australian outpost of vertical integration in Adelaide.

Tim has since built a centre in the Adelaide Hills where his SA farmed-beef is dry aged up to an astonishingly impressive 100 days.

But of the things — and there are many — wrong with this restaurant opening at the tail end of 2016, two words sum up how misplaced it is: salad bar.

This random assemblage of bits to put in your bowl (dried apricots! celery! kale! cucumber!) felt like it was channelling The Keg, the ’90s steakhouse that was also a northern hemisphere import delivering gingham-clad good-times.

Music as clinically dull as a doctor’s waiting room, the wine card replete with pictures and napkins hanging by a hook add to a picture of dining as out of place down Duckboard Lane as a Sizzler cheese toast.

At least at The Keg waiters actually took your order. Here, you have to number your own docket — with a pen hanging by a tread from the table — 10A will get you the entry level 160g eye fillet for $35, 23B is 700g of aged rib eye for $75 — to which you must add that $12 salad bar, or a small pot of $5 fries.

Not that we knew this for some time. After a warm welcome from the barman — the front bar that looks out onto the graffitied laneway is separated by a thin corridor from the overwhelmingly blonde wood dining room that looks out over Flinders St foliage — we were left at our table for 10 minutes before anyone offered a drink, or explained how much we were about to DIY.

Before the steak, a theme park of entrees: meatballs, mini hotdogs and gravad lax salmon that’s carved tableside in a touch of amateur theatre.

The pale-fleshed, dill-crusted fish is fine if not particularly memorable other than, at $20, costing $5 per thin slice. Light rye bread (OK) and a sweet mustard sauce (overpowering) its only accompaniment.

The stjerneskud — crumbed flounder with mayo-dressed prawns and asparagus on pumpernickel, $20, is good, though it did nothing to dissuade me that open sandwiches are as useless as the proverbial bits on a bull. What’s the point of a sandwich you have to eat with cutlery?

And though the table looks impressive set with it, that cutlery is ill-considered, the knife especially sitting in your palm awkwardly and painfully. The metal plates the steaks are served on are also form over function, though that 100-day rib eye ($85) was so tepid the round of cold herb butter atop kept its form, too. But even hard butter beat the insipid béarnaise. It did a good job of ruining otherwise good steak, the ageing giving it a pillow-soft texture, though I was hoping for more funky umami characters that three months’ age would impart.

I thought the flavour of the saltbush mutton, dry aged for 30 days, much bolder, though at $38 for just three small cutlets, very expensive.

The sharp wine list is the most exciting thing about the otherwise dour experience. A dozen bottled Victorian craft beers, wines admirably local in focus. But the good stuff is only by the bottle — the by-the-glass selection snoringly staid in comparison — and given wine service (“What one is that? It’s easier if you point it out to me” said our waitress) extends only so far as to pour (and dribble) the first glass before dumping the bottle in the centre of the table, I wouldn’t be happy if I paid $130 here for a Tolpuddle pinot or Georgia’s Paddock shiraz, even if they are reasonably marked up.

A dessert platter ($25 for two) — chocolate mousse, crème brulee, berry parfait and rice pudding — had all sorts of interesting words alongside on the menu but tasted mainly of sugar.

This is the type of place that could perhaps find a home in a shopping centre, where people might go for a steak (and salad!) before a movie. But not at these prices: dinner for two with a $65 bottle of wine was $270.

This is a flawed concept, executed ineptly. Apparently the “A” in the name is colloquial Danish for “something positive” but I can’t find anything, other than very comfortable chairs.