Viva’s Johanna Thornton heads to Adelaide to sample the best of the region during Tasting Australia festival, which sees South Australia come alive with food and wine events, and finds a city buzzing with great places to dine and explore.
For a city smaller than Auckland, Adelaide punches way above
This hot take will come as no surprise to Adelaidians (in fact, I can feel them rolling their eyes as they sip chilled red at Leigh Street Wine Room or share bowls of pipis sizzling in chilli butter at Africola), but it might if you haven’t paid a visit in the past five years. The South Australian city has had an exciting amount of growth recently, with a burgeoning bar and restaurant scene adding to its already world-renowned wine offering.
With 18 wine regions on its doorstep — the likes of Barossa, McLaren Vale, Clare Valley and Adelaide Hills — Adelaide’s wine has always been a drawcard. These diverse regions have their own unique food and wine offering, and visitors could easily spend several days in each of them, discovering their cellar doors, historic vineyards, and dining at restaurants specialising in premium local produce and award-winning wine. Adelaide has even been crowned one of the 12 Great Wine Capitals of the World alongside Bordeaux, Lausanne, Napa Valley and most recently Hawke’s Bay, and it’s not hard to see why.
I was recently in town for Tasting Australia, South Australia’s longest-running food and wine festival that sees the region come alive with more than 50 events across 10 days, from chef’s table dinners and masterclasses to food, wine and culture-infused day trips to special places like Kangaroo Island and the stunning Flinders Ranges.
Producers, chefs, food personalities, media and visitors from across Australia fly in for the event to experience the best of South Australia. Many high-profile chefs are there to host their own events, as well as partake in some of the fun. Like Byron Bay-based festival co-director Darren Robertson, the multihyphenate chef and co-owner of the renowned Three Blue Ducks restaurants, as well as cookbook author and general cool dude who presided over most of the events.
The influx of talent — and festival goers — creates a palpable buzz in the city, with restaurants and hotels full, and the Town Square turned into a festival hub vibrating with events, people, music and the smell of cooking wafting into the air until late in the night. That celebratory feel was on peak display at Tasting Australia’s ‘Steamed’ event in the Town Square, where seven top chefs cooked a yum cha course matched with South Australian wines to a sold-out crowd. Festival goers ate five-spice grilled duck breast with Asian greens created by Terry Intarakhamhaeng of Adelaide’s popular Soi 38 restaurant, and a Mayura Station wagyu beef barbecued by Aussie legend Cheong Liew. For dessert, a sugar-dusted doughnut filled with Riverland jujube and egg custard, and topped with fresh flowers arrived in a bamboo steamer, made by festival co-director and owner of McLaren Vale’s Salopian Inn Karena Armstrong.
Chefs aren’t just cooking at Tasting Australia, they’re often at the table eating alongside ticket holders, like local legend and private chef Tom Tilbury, former executive chef of top Adelaide restaurant Press Food & Wine, who’s hard at work opening a new two-storey Italian restaurant on Gouger St this year. One seat down is Max Veenhuyzen, Gourmet Traveller’s West Australian food writer, who says Adelaide is one of his favourite food destinations, its wine regions and remote locations making the food on offer hard to beat. Max was off to DJ at natural wine bar Loc later that night, one of several new-wave, low-intervention wine bars in the city.
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Advertise with NZME.The idea of food provenance — a menu buzzword — rings particularly true in Adelaide, with its endless stretch of coastline, the city is essentially one long 28km beach. A short drive from the city, which is surrounded by a green belt of parklands, are those wine regions, with their rich, fertile soils and undulating hills. The beautiful Adelaide Hills area has its own microclimate perfect for cool climate wines and is a melting pot of pioneering winemakers growing some of the country’s finest grapes, as well as restaurateurs making the most of the area’s orchards and market gardens.
Ask anyone in the industry about Adelaide’s growth as a food and wine destination and they’ll mention the change to the liquor licensing laws in 2013 that made it easier for small venues to obtain a liquor licence. It saw a surge in small restaurants and wine bars opening in a city that previously only allowed hotels and big pubs to sell drinks. Adelaide’s central city is now brimming with these buzzy new openings, from Peel St’s wine bars to Chinatown’s eateries and cafes.
At Fino Vino, a sleek yet cosy brick-walled wine bar with ochre booths and a long communal table, the menu is all about simple, fresh flavours where every ingredient sings. Owner Sharon Romeo has been a stalwart of the South Australian hospitality industry for 30 years and was crowned Gourmet Traveller’s Restaurant Personality of the Year in 2022. She and executive chef David Swain opened the original Fino restaurant in McLaren Vale in 2006 with a focus on provenance, highlighting produce from South Australia and presenting it simply and beautifully. The duo brought this winning formula to Barossa’s showpiece winery Seppeltsfield in 2014 and opened Fino’s central city location in 2019.
As a host, Sharon puts you instantly at ease, guiding you through the menu and making gentle suggestions you’d be a fool not to acquiesce to. She recommends oysters from Coffin Bay on the Eyre Peninsula, where nutrient-rich sea water flows up from the South Pacific, served simply with a cheek of lemon. I must order the pickled vegetables inspired by the ones her dad used to make in the Italian town of Plati, as well as locally caught tuna crudo that arrives nestled under radish slices with sprouted lentils in a pool of chilli oil. Fino’s eggplant is charred and placed atop a chickpea pancake slathered with yoghurt and piled with pickled okra, fresh mint and parsley. It’s all simple, fresh and stunning, like Sharon said it would be.
Not far from Fino Vino, Osteria Oggi is another good-looking inner-city restaurant, this time in the style of an Italian piazza with dramatic archways, cobblestone floors and one long bar running the length of the space. It’s loud here, and busy, with every table full. Drinks arrive swiftly — a Tomfoolery Young Blood Shiraz from Barossa Valley and a local Coopers Sparkling Ale. The food is Italian-style fare designed to share, with a focus on big bowls of freshly made pasta. I order the gnocchetti with broccoli, chilli, anchovy and parmesan, and casarecce with sausage, chilli and cheese, both of them big enough to serve two. It’s all very cool, very generous and very loud — like a true Italian restaurant.
You’d be wise to score a booth at yakitori bar Shobosho, which specialises in Japanese and Korean flavours cooked over a blazing fire pit, wood oven and hydraulic grill. Dishes here are refined yet flavourful, sophisticated yet satisfying, like leek charred over flames and marooned in bright green wakame sauce and drizzled with smoked buttermilk. Or the katsu sando with juicy crumbed pork meatballs, layered with crispy cabbage and tonkatsu sauce sandwiched between fluffy white bread.
The Summertown Aristologist is a must-try; the kind of restaurant you mention in passing and people nod emphatically about how great it is. I arrived on a cold, rainy night at this destination restaurant, named after the area of Summertown high up in the Adelaide Hills, not knowing much about its beloved status as a community-minded restaurant since 2016. The interior appeared comfortably worn in from many nights of good food and wine, with handsome dark wood surfaces, booths and plastered archways. People were propped at the window or gathered at the communal table in the centre of the restaurant, the chefs busy at work over the fire pit in the partially open kitchen.
Owned by winemakers Anton van Klopper, Jasper Button and Aaron Fenwick, The Aristologist specialises in low-intervention natural wines and a weekly-changing menu highlighting produce from its own organic garden in Basket Range, as well as proteins from local farmers and fisheries.
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That means simple, humble dishes like hand-peeled tomatoes and basil harvested from the garden that day, served with a half round of smoked curds and olive oil. A fillet of fresh kingfish from Elliston was cooked over charcoal and lemon leaves, until the skin was insanely crisp, and served on a deeply savoury sauce made with kina and mussels. A pork chop was cooked medium-rare over the fire pit, sliced and served with vinegar-soaked mustard seeds and fermented apple sauce. To finish, a light-as-air honey parfait with tart poached quince.
Also in the Adelaide Hills, Hardy’s Verandah Restaurant is destination fine dining located in the historic Mount Lofty House, a luxury hotel with a storied history, originally built in 1852. The three-hatted restaurant opened in 2017 as part of a major refurbishment to the hotel and surrounding grounds, serving four- or seven-course degustation menus with a “valley to verandah concept”, plating food from the region and pairing it with exceptional wines. Entering the grand Mount Lofty House through its five-metre-high wooden door is like stepping back in time, its interiors exuding old-world charm with Chesterfield armchairs cosied up to roaring fireplaces, and secret club rooms at every turn.
The white linen-covered tables at Hardy’s Verandah Restaurant are positioned to take in the views over the Piccadilly Valley wine region, with windows that stay open during summer. I ate hay-smoked duck with plum sauce, turnip and Asian greens, and pan-fried whiting covered with slithers of squid and drenched in a butter sauce, under a shard of deep-fried kombu that looked like crocodile skin. For dessert, a fig and pecan icecream had a crisp bee pollen skin to crack through, made of sugary, powdered baked rye bread. Hardy’s is renowned for its wine offering, and its degustations are designed to match with sommelier-chosen drops, which takes the pressure off choosing from the 80-page wine list (downstairs in Arthur’s Cellar, there are more than 3500 bottles stored).
On the grounds of Mount Lofty Estate is new luxury lodge Sequoia, named after the two giant sequoia trees planted outside. This exquisite adults-only lodge opened in 2021 with 14 private suites that overlook Piccadilly Valley’s pristine vineyards and rolling hills. The service here is immaculate, as you’d expect from Adelaide’s premiere luxury offering, from check-in to daily breakfast service and nightly turn-downs. The sustainably minded rooms are designed around the stunning valley views, which can be seen from the king-size bed, the bath, the balcony’s daybed or, my favourite, under a blanket on the leather couch next to the Basket Range sandstone fireplace.
The temperatures this high in the Adelaide Hills are five to seven degrees colder than at sea level (which is why it’s home to so many cool-climate wines), making it an ideal retreat in summer but it’s also spectacular in autumn, with the trees and vines orange and yellow, and a mist that descends upon the valley at dusk. A dip in Sequoia’s spring-fed hot pools with a glass of wine is an unmissable experience, as is a treatment at its Gatekeeper’s Day Spa.
While Sequoia is so comfortable and luxurious it’s hard to leave, part of its ethos is celebrating its Adelaide Hills location, and it’s the ideal jump-off point for exploring the surrounding area. Sequoia’s Lisa Loftus armed me with a full day’s to-do list of cafes, wineries and areas of interest to visit, like Bekkers Wine, Down The Rabbit Hole Wines and d’Arenberg Cube in McLaren Vale, as well as Deviation Road winery, the Botanical Gardens, East End Cellars, Italian food from La Trattoria and Golden Boy Thai food, all worth adding to your itinerary.
Closer to town, boutique four-star Hotel Indigo also opened in 2021, a two-minute walk from Adelaide Central Market in Adelaide’s Chinatown area. While this IHG Hotel is part of a global chain (there’s one tipped for Auckland in 2024), no two Hotel Indigos are the same, with each designed to reflect their neighbourhood. That means copper joinery in an ode to South Australia’s copper mining industry, and red brick archways nodding to the 1900s brick facade of Adelaide Central Market.
A must-visit, the bustling market covers a central city block, with more than 70 stallholders selling fruits and vegetables, cheeses, wine and chocolate from the likes of Barossa Fine Foods, Marino Meat and Food Store, Haigh’s Chocolates and Fleurieu Milk Co. You can drop in for a coffee, stay for lunch or shop locally for ingredients for dinner that night. Hotel Indigo has its own dining options though, with a modern Italian restaurant on the ground floor, and the funky Merrymaker rooftop bar on the 16th floor, with views over the city skyline and Adelaide Hills to the east.
It’s from this vantage point that the city’s varied landscape comes into frame, from the beachside pubs to its inner-city wine bars and market garden restaurants high up in the hills. Is Adelaide one of Australia’s hottest food cities? Absolutely.
More great things to add to your Adelaide itinerary
Glenelg
One of Adelaide’s many drawcards is its beautiful stretch of 30km coastline that includes several beaches a short drive from the city centre. Glenelg is affectionately known as Adelaide’s answer to the Gold Coast with its white sand beach, bars, shopping and restaurants. It’s accessible via a tram from the CBD, which takes around 20 minutes. Here you can swim, walk and explore. Make a pit stop at The Moseley, a bar right on the beach with picnic tables spread out on the sand.
The AGSA is a must-visit cultural institution in Adelaide, with a stunning permanent collection of Australian art housed in a historic building on North Terrace. It stands on the land of the Kaurna people, and was the first state gallery to acquire a piece from an Aboriginal artist in 1939 and now houses one of the most significant collections of indigenous works. On the day we visit the gallery, it’s in the final days of its key exhibition, Andy Warhol & Photography: A Social Media, which featured photographs, paintings and film by Warhol, including pop art portraits and collaborative works with the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Gerard Malanga. The gallery is currently exhibiting Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution, which had its successful debut at Auckland Art Gallery earlier this year. Open daily from 10am-5pm.
Adelaide Botanic Gardens
This magical inner-city botanic garden is well worth a wander, with 50 hectares of gardens spanning everything from wetlands to forest, dahlias to roses, just moments from Adelaide’s premier shopping street, Rundle Mall. Don’t miss the Amazon Waterlily Pavilion, a glass structure inspired by the leaves of the Amazon waterlily which houses a pond full of these oversized beauties — the largest of which is 165cm in diameter. It’s one of three botanic gardens in Adelaide, with the Mount Lofty Botanic Gardens high up in Adelaide Hills, and the 12-hectare Wittunga Botanic Garden south of Adelaide in Shepherds Hill.
As part of Tasting Australia, Viva visited Aurora Restaurant on Light Square in the CBD, which is part of Light ADL, a not-for-profit charity that encourages independent creative projects and collaborations. Light ADL spans The Lab, a performance space with LED screens; The Light Room, which is a bar/gallery/studio; and Aurora, a restaurant focusing on sustainable, local produce helmed by chefs Brendan Wessells and Sam Cooper. Tasting Australia’s ‘From Adelaide to Albany’ event invited guests to the Lab for a light-filled intro to the dinner over snacks and bubbles, followed by a multi-course dinner in the restaurant. Chef Matt Stone (known for his sustainable ethos) joined Aurora’s Brendan and Sam to create a menu of South and West Australian produce. It was an intro to Leeuwin Coast Akoya, a sustainable seafood that tastes like a combination of pāua and oysters, farmed from the King George Sound off the coast of Albany. Aurora is a beautiful restaurant and this event was a showcase of some of the regions’s best ingredients (and wines), like Torndirrup Native Herb cheese with fig and quince from Singing Magpie in Riverland. The dish of the night was crispy potato in a chicken cream with scorched onion, paired with a Murdoch Hill Rocket Chardonnay from Adelaide Hills.
Uraidla Hotel and The Cube
Another Adelaide Hills destination, the Uraidla Hotel is a charming pub and hotel on the slopes of Mount Lofty with a sprawling bistro menu of pub classics, a great drinks list (there’s a brewery on site) and a mission to reduce, reuse, recycle and refuse where possible. Its fruit and vegetables are grown on-site, and it offers an extensive vegan and vegetarian menu. The Uraidhla Hotel, which opened in 1867, is a bit of an icon in the area, and underwent its latest round of renovations under new ownership in 2016, which has seen the addition of a new restaurant, bakery and brewery. It’s also home to underground wine cellar The Tank, housing over 4000 bottles of wine, where you can book in for a tasting of some of South Australia’s most exciting wines, especially those from the surrounding Picadilly Valley sub-region, as well as standout wines from around the world. The Tank was once an in-ground water tank that has been transformed into a tasting room with floor-to-ceiling wine racks and a central circular table. The tasting experience was a great introduction to the region, with our knowledgeable sommelier sharing the history and geography of Adelaide Hills, as well as tasting notes on its world-class wines.
Never Never Distilling Co
High up on a hill in the gorgeous McLaren Vale wine region is Never Never Distilling Co, with a great-looking distillery door offering gin-tasting flights, cocktails and wine with a view of the surrounding vineyards. To eat, there is Italian street food from an outdoor food truck, the Cucina di Strada, or dine (and drink) at Chalk Hill Winery right next door. The distillery’s interior is truly Insta-worthy, with dusky pink banquettes and curved leather booths and rows of backlit gin bottles behind an impressive bar. But the place to be is outside on the terrace or sprawled on a bean bag on the grass in the sun, where you can sample Never Never’s range of award-winning gin via a tasting flight. A classic gin and tonic flight consisted of a Triple Juniper Gin with fresh lemon and thyme, Southern Strength Gin with fresh mint and a Juniper Freak Gin with grapefruit and rosemary, plus a matching tonic. Never Never’s full range of gin is available to take home, a wonderful keepsake from South Australia, if you ask me.
Johanna Thornton flew to Adelaide courtesy of Tourism South Australia.
