Moody isn’t something I usually like on a date, but it works if we’re talking about the restaurant and not your companion’s temperament. With its red carpet and black walls, its clubby entrance underneath Rockpool Bar and Grill, Spice Temple is elegant, sexy and ends up making you blush profusely. All things, conversely, I rather like on a date.

It’s the perfect date place if you’re not determined to really see your cohort, so dark it is inside. The actual tables are well lit though, so while you won’t know whether your date has shaved her head, you will know what to order. The spotlight, after all, is on the food.

It’s like going from hawker stall to hawker stall without leaving your seat. The food ambitiously travels via Sichuan, Yunnan, Hunan, Jiangxi and Xinjiang, which all in all means spice, and lots of it. It’s a fine dining experience, but with playful twists on casual street-stall food you might find all over China. Think live pipes from the tank tossed with black beans and salted chilli, hot, sweet, sour and numbing pork with black vinegar and Sichuan peppercorns, crispy chow mein done “Australian Chinese style” with pork relish.

Neil Perry shouldn’t really be judged as a chef for what he does at Rockpool Bar and Grill, even Rockpool. This is the real deal, and he’s picked up a cuisine that at one point was outside his comfort zone and turned it into one of the best Chinese offerings in Sydney, possibly Australia. That flexibility, the vibrancy he brings to the cuisine when there’s nothing quite like to replicate or measure himself upon, makes him a chef for the age.

The food is mouth teasing, numbing, salty, brain-kickingly hot, as well as comforting. I want to refer back to what we really want on a date again, but I’ll resist.

Tel: 02 8078 1888

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