It can be fun to eat at a flirty flibbertigibbet of a restaurant, serving food that will be out of fashion by next Friday. You can start with a silly cocktail, caw like crazy, and talk trash till they mop the floors around you. All fine and dandy - every now and then. But I'm more impressed by restaurants that play the game steady-as-she-goes, hanging on to regulars by the scruff, seducing customers midweek, cocking a snook at food trends while keeping menus judiciously updated.

Wildflower is one such dogged stayer. It's a local mainstay that doesn't make cross-towners feel like they've wasted their time. The food is contemporary and appealing but unthreatening: blue cheese and truffle oil souffle; slow-cooked pork with apple and walnut salad; eye fillet with celeriac gratin. It's a restaurant for grown-ups - you're more likely to overhear talk of superannuation than superfly graffiti. There's plenty of love in the room: home-baked bread is unstintingly offered, two complimentary amuse-bouches punctuated our dinner, and I never saw the bottom of my water glass.

The narrow two-storey building is in the bricked square off cutie-pie Maling Road. It's been a restaurant for well over a decade; Tony Phelan and Natalie Canavan took over in 2001. He cooks, she runs the floor. The young couple bought the restaurant sight unseen on the home stretch of a three-year European jaunt and they may have cursed their decision once or twice. For a start, there's no passing trade: if you've ever wanted to pretend you were the only person on Earth, come to Maling Road on a Saturday night. Also, the pair battled on as a BYO operation until 2005, when they finally got a liquor licence and built a petite, affordable wine list.

Phelan's food is pretty, often served on rectangular platters and augmented with squirts of sauce or puree. He changes the menu frequently and refuses to be hijacked by signature dishes, probably a smart move in a restaurant with plenty of customers who come in twice a week. That said, you can count on a steak and he's partial to shellfish. I loved the seared, succulent roe-free scallops, served with cauliflower puree, teeny fondant potatoes and parmesan wafers. The dish was beautifully seasoned which made an over-salty chicken-and-leek ballotine all the more disappointing. Better was a nicely seared finger of salmon with zinging harissa glaze.

There's an unnecessarily long list of desserts, which perhaps accounts for the imperfect nature of some of them. Diners are invited to choose three sweets from a list of 20 (total cost $15). Most of the desserts are frozen (banana ice-cream, passionfruit sorbet, vanilla-and-honeycomb parfait) so spoilage issues are minimised but I did feel that the blueberry bakewell tart might have been better the day before. And while I'm nitpicking, the toilet was freezing - though perhaps if I was there just for a wee and not to write notes, it wouldn't have been so bad.

Consistency is a hard thing for a restaurant to pull off but, for the most part, Wildflower nails it. It's not Melbourne's most exciting or fashionable place to dine but it's not trying to be. More important, it's reliable and hospitable and that's why people often walk out the door wondering when they might return.