At Lennox Hastie’s Sydney restaurant Firedoor, there are no modern cooking appliances – just wood.

Paul Wilson’s South Yarra diner, Wilson & Market, is equipped a little differently. But when fire-focused chef Hastie arrived at the restaurant on Wednesday for a special collaborative dinner service, there were no plans to use anything but the woodfire oven and an open-fire grill.

Hastie and Wilson's menu began with sweet, plump pipis scorched over apple wood, then cherry-wood-grilled octopus. It feels unjust to pull any highlights out of what was a comprehensively impressive meal from start to finish, but the next two courses – a roasted wild kingfish and a grilled quail – were two of the best dishes I’ve eaten this year, with each plate scrubbed clean of any remaining skerrick of anchovy-laced (the kingfish) or jammy molasses sauce (the quail).

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The kingfish – smoky, meaty, citrusy – had a Sicilian soul, with charred puntarella (a variety of chicory), almonds and olives. The quail – smoky, gamy, sweet – sat in a pool of fruity, silky gravy, with a kind of risotto-like medley of farro and sausage.

And then, the show stopper. Literally. 186-day dry-aged rib of beef; marble score seven plus. On the grill, flames licking ever higher in an open kitchen around which diners had gathered for the show.

When Hastie cooks steak in Sydney, he’s not cooking for an entire restaurant at once. And he’s cooking in a kitchen specifically designed for flames. A lot of fat runs off steak so dense in intramuscular fat. In this case, it drips onto blistering coals, catches fire and flames lick the exhaust with greater and greater ferocity.

Everyone had their phones out, watching as Hastie hovered and danced in front of the grill – checking, flipping, checking, flipping. He moved from end to end along the grill, fast and focused. We were rapt. The blaze grew. The rangehood blackened. Someone quipped that they hoped the exhaust had been cleaned. And then, a waterfall.

Have you ever seen fire sprinklers go off? I haven’t. It was like a hyperlocal torrential downpour-hurricane, inside a kitchen. One minute, Hastie and the flames dancing; the next, you could barely see through the water spewing out of the ceiling. More phones out to capture the flood. In fact, journalist Paul Best captured the moment it happened.

“In my whole career I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Paul Wilson said to the crowd about an hour later.

He, and Hastie – despite a biblical rainstorm in the kitchen and the firefighters now sharing their cooking space – could not have been calmer. Hastie still managed to get the remaining steaks out for dinner, grilled on the plancha, which he says he hadn’t cooked on for seven years. It didn't matter - those steaks would go head to head with the best served anywhere in Australia.

“When Paul invited me down to Melbourne he said it’s liable to rain a little bit,” he joked after service.

The same thing had, in fact, happened at a soft opening just days before he opened Firedoor in 2015.

"It’s one of those things you can’t prepare yourself for.”

And for Hastie, that’s one of the attractions of cooking over open flames.

“It’s hard enough being a chef day to day, and even harder with fire,” he continued. “I’ve been cooking for 12 years with fire – it continues to excite me on a daily basis.”