Food and wine have always been the fabric of Adelaide’s identity.
A city circled by 18 world-renowned wine regions; with the hills, ocean and ranges alive in restaurant menus… with its own creative, experimental, ‘you can’t box us in’ identity. Refined, yet playful. Worldly, but local. Inquisitive and traditional. It’s the perfect paradox that fires your curiosity, tastebuds, and sense of adventure; all within the convenient confines of its chessboard layout. The city has played into its strengths: access to incredible regional produce, a year-round festival calendar and supportive, fine diners advocating for the state. Sensational food is an ingrained element of South Australia. But it’s the stories behind these restaurants that really make our state interesting.
Down at the Barossa’s Hentley Farm, vegetables just harvested from the surrounding fields are scrubbed of their dirt ready to feature in one of head chef Lachlan Colwill’s creations. His fine-dining menu is carefully crafted based on what is flourishing and growing abundantly in the restaurant’s surrounding 150 acres. Foraged wild ingredients complement fruit, vegetables and herbs grown in sprawling garden beds and overflowing orchards in a homage to the ways of eating yesteryear; seasonal and fresh.
That same love for fresh, local produce is evident at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens Restaurant, where they do away with preconceived notions of what a restaurant is. With 20 combinations dished out as part of a curated tasting menu by chef Justin James, all your senses will be awoken – from the taste and smell of James’ unique creations to the sight and sounds of the surrounding lush gardens and even the feeling of the food in your fingers (forks get put to the side). Nestled amid Adelaide’s botanic gardens and inspired by the flora and fauna found in this inner-city oasis, you can expect to find things like green ants, finger limes, paperbark parsnip pie and bunya bunya branches on the menu. Be warned though – this is not a meal for those short on time. It is akin to booking an experience like any other tour, with a minimum dining experience lasting four hours. It’s garden to plate dining at its most sophisticated, nestled among lush, botanical garden setting you’d hardly believe was the centre of the city.
Our city streets are literally teeming with award-winning restaurants dishing up unique, mouth-watering flavours. Pull up a seat in a chic North African diner in the middle of Adelaide where Johannesburg-born chef Duncan Welgemoed dishes up a bold taste of Africa from chicken skin sandwiches, to woodfired cauliflower and fermented flatbreads at Africola. A fiery authentic yakitori fest? Reserve a table at Leigh Street institution Shōbōsho where smoky flavours are complemented with raw, cured, pickled and fermented dishes and are best served with a side of sashimi, noodles, yakitori, dumplings and bao. Or pull up a seat at Adelaide Oval's Five Region's Restaurant where head chef, Paul Lewis, takes inspiration from regional wines, telling the winemaker’s story through a menu inspired by regional ingredients, landscapes and seasonality.
Even the humble pizza is elevated in Adelaide with the like's of Sunny's Pizza and Bandit Pizza and Wine Bar. Speaking of Italian, you won’t find better pasta than that rolled at Nido by Masterchef’s Laura Sharrad.
And just a stone’s throw from the city? At McLaren Vale’s Maxwell Wines, mushrooms grown beneath the earth in a 100-year-old limestone cave are served in the fine-dining restaurant above. Meanwhile down the road at d’Arenberg Wines, lunch time degustations at d’Arry’s Verandah are paired best with a post-lunch tour through a giant Rubik's cube filled with wine and art. The Limestone Coast’s gentle rolling hills and lush green pastures produce unparalleled-quality, award-winning Wagyu beef at Mayura Station. And in the Adelaide Hills, you'll need a mailed invitation to dine at Villetta Porcini, a European-style stone hut tucked in a lush valley. Here, renowned pasta chef Andre Ursini serves up a foraged, seasonal menu inspired by the surrounding gardens, veggie patches, bee hives and wild porcini mushrooms.
On the Eyre Peninsula, seafood lovers wade waist-deep into the pristine waters of Coffin Bay to slurp what are arguably the world’s best oysters straight from the source on a working oyster farm at Coffin Bay Oyster Farm. In the Adelaide Hills, Woodside Cheese Wrights’ head cheese maker Kris Lloyd waits until spring, when goats milk is at sweetest, to create her multi-award-winning Vigneron; a creamy, earthy goats cheese wrapped in vine leaves and washed in wine sourced from McLaren Vale’s Coriole Vineyards. While the pristine island wilderness of Kangaroo Island produces the purest form of Ligurian honey in the world, brought to the island by European beekeepers in 1881 in a move that inadvertently saved this northern Italy bee species. In the Fleurieu Peninsula’s Coorong National Park, locals sift through golden sand at low tide in search of pipis that will end up in the kitchens of some of the best restaurants around the world but are best enjoyed on the banks of the Coorong at Goolwa Pipi Co’s Kuri Shack. It’s this passion for locally sourced food that really sets South Australia apart and draws crowds of hungry foodies.
Good food starts with good produce, and South Australia has been blessed with nature’s bounty. Our Mediterranean climate, with warm, dry summers and mild winters creates a veritable garden of Eden for food production, and our regional produce is sought the world over. The Riverland abounds with groves of citrus, stone fruits and nuts, while apples and berries flourish on the verdant valleys of the Adelaide Hills. Patchworks of vegetable fields stretch across the plains and unique, native produce can be found in pockets of the ancient Flinders Ranges and Outback. Fertile, rich soils are to thank for South Australia’s incredible dairy production and our pristine waters offer up some of the best seafood in the world.
The city’s 30%, foreign-born and blended population has fed into Adelaide’s culinary identity, too. A walk through the Adelaide Central Market is a gastronomic gateway to the globe. At Lucia’s Fine Food, jars of tomato sauce are stacked next to continental breads and small goods, as pizza and pasta are pumped out the kitchen to hungry diners. Across the market, Mona and Mohammed’s sweets at The Turkish Delight offer an authentic taste of the Mediterranean while the unique flavours of Algeria await at Le Souk. Countless Asian eateries dish up everything from Chinese, to Indian, Malaysian, Cambodian and Vietnamese. A culinary connection to homelands left behind, now irrevocably interwoven into South Australia’s rich food story.
And the wine? We’re not exaggerating when we say South Australia produces the best wine in the world. It’s official, and you’ll find the proof at the Barossa’s Kellermeister Wine. Although South Australia’s wines are steeped in history, we’re not afraid to do things differently. Aged in French-oak barrels buried deep in the McLaren Vale earth beneath the vines where the grapes for the wine were handpicked, Gemtree Wines’ SubTerra single-vineyard shiraz is the world’s only wine aged in the ground. It’s this thirst to push the boundaries that sets SA’s wines apart. With vines stretching across the state like festoon lighting from the sea in McLaren Vale, to the cool-climate varietals grown on the rolling valleys of the Adelaide Hills, further north to the world-renowned reds of the Barossa and famous Rieslings of Clare Valley, and to the bold reds born from the rich terra-rossa soils of the Coonawarra, you’ll always have a decent drop to wash down any meal in South Australia. Better still, nearly all these wine regions are just minutes from the city. Where else can claim that?
Wine’s not South Australia’s only specialty beverage, though. With an ever-growing craft-brewing movement, our beer has earned its fair share of accolades and you don’t have to stumble far to find a unique, local brew. Like at Port Adelaide’s Pirate Life Brewing where monthly experiments will have you sipping beers subtly flavoured with unlikely ingredients like strawberry Berliner, whiskey, red wine, passionfruit and acai, or the Fleurieu Peninsula’s Swell Brewing, where chocolate milk stout is poured among rolling vineyards. You don’t have to search too hard for a gin distillery either, with inventive blends created using native ingredients and local produce drawing the gin-drinking world’s attention. At Kangaroo Island Spirits, native coastal daisy imparts sweet, piney notes to their O Gin. Perhaps one of the reasons it was named the 2019 best contemporary gin at the International Wine and Spirits competition in London. We’re also officially home to Australia’s best whiskey and the country’s best cider. Yep, Adelaide is a heavy hitter in the alcohol arena, and it’s all put to good use down our boozy laneways, where streets lined with quirky, speakeasy bars run through the city like a lifeblood for thirsty revellers.
The UK’s Sunday times rated Adelaide alongside cities of gastronomy such as Lyons, Copenhagen and San Sebastian, but the truth is Adelaide’s foodie culture is undefinable. It’s the sum of its parts, influenced by a love of fresh, local produce, an insatiable pioneering hunger to be different and a determination to be better. There’s no place, or plate, quite like it.
Hungry for more?
Start your gastronomic journey through South Australia in the heart of the city with our guide to the best restaurants in Adelaide.
