Kickin'Inn Port Melbourne

UPDATE Monday, July 19: During Lockdown 5.0, Kickin' Inn is relocating its messy mixed seafood feasts to your house, with pick-up and delivery available via Menulog. Your food even comes packed with butchers paper, bibs and gloves, so you can recreate the signature Kickin' Inn experience at your own kitchen table. Plus, right now you'll score 25 per cent off a range of special items (peeled prawns, baby octopus and mussels, included) when you use the code 'KICKIN25'. For more details on Victoria's current restrictions, see the Department of Health and Human Services website.

If you thought seafood was best suited to sultry summer days, Port Melbourne's newest restaurant might change your mind. The Aussie-born chain Kickin' Inn already has eight NSW restaurants under its belt, and now it's adding its first Melbourne venue to the family.

Kickin' Inn has taken over the former Rose Hotel site and promises to cure those lingering winter blues with a signature offering of seafood tossed through punchy house-made 'Kajun' sauces.

For the uninitiated, Kickin' Inn offers an all-in, bibs-and-gloves experience, where diners do away with cutlery and get their hands messy with bags full of prawns, mud crab, pipis and shellfish using only the tools that Jesus gave you. The Cajun-inspired house sauces — here, dubbed 'Kajun' — are more than mere support acts, with the venue boasting five flavour-charged secret recipes.

If feasting is on the agenda, you'll find an abundance of snacks to kick things off including battered squid tentacles, jalapeno cheese bites ($19), freshly-shucked Sydney rock oysters ($18-28) and wings ($29). After that, you've got some big decisions to make. Choose your main event from a slew of ocean-fresh goodies including whole crayfish ($48), pounds of peeled prawns ($29-39), a pile of baby octopus ($29), blue swimmer pieces ($32), or a mess of mussels and pipis ($94). Pick a matching sauce, whack in some additions like corn or chorizo, and dial up the heat level as high as you dare — keeping in mind the 'inferno' option is only halfway up the scale.

Meanwhile, a separate lunch menu features more solo-friendly feeds from a prawn spaghetti ($24) to a mini mixed bag of seafood served with rice ($24).