The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Besha Rodell, a columnist for the Australia bureau.

When I left my five-year post as restaurant critic for LA Weekly in 2017 to move back to Australia, the final review I filed was for a restaurant called Vespertine, an immersive experience in a multistory glass building that is as much performance art as it is restaurant.

That description might sound familiar to anyone who read my Australia Fare column this week, a review of the d’Arenberg Cube in McLaren Vale, South Australia. I thought a lot about Vespertine while considering the d’Arenberg Cube. The two restaurants have many similarities: they both are inspired by — and in fact inseparable from — the architecture of the buildings they are in, and they both invite us to experience dinner (or, in the case of the d’Arenberg Cube, lunch) as far more than a meal.

Vespertine’s most notable flaw is undoubtedly its rigid self-seriousness. Atonal music grinds while unsmiling waiters wearing dark-colored sacks deliver preposterous dishes, giving no hint that they understand the absurdity of the setting and situation. The d’Arenberg Cube, on the other hand, revels in its own silliness and sense of fun. And it challenges the diner to give in to that joyous folly, or risk wasting $210 and a few hours on a meal (and an experience) that is as ridiculous as it is delicious.

As I point out in my review of the Cube, the restaurant succeeds in large part because of that ridiculousness, not in spite of it. I also quoted a neighboring winemaker as saying that the Cube would be unbearable if it weren’t “kind of daggy.”