Coal Cellar & Grill | SA Weekend restaurant review

Unpretentious cooking, rather than the tricky stuff, is this restaurant’s strong suit. But Simon Wilkinson recommends sticking to mains – everything else can be given the chop.

Dining room at Coal Cellar and Grill, Hilton Adelaide

A quality piece of steak can be fabulous but too often the flavour doesn’t live up to the price. Decent snags are always welcome, particularly when they come with plenty of sizzled onions. But it’s the humble lamb loin chop, for mine, that offers best barbecue bang-for-buck.

In fact, the only thing better than a single loin chop is two. And that, friends, is where the barnsley chop comes in. For those unaccustomed with this rarely seen cut, it is simply both sides of the loin still attached rather than sawn through the middle, creating a mirrored duplicate of your chop with one continuous seam of fat across the top.

The barnsley at the Hilton Adelaide’s Coal Cellar & Grill is quite an undertaking, a thick, doorstop of heavily charred meat, bone and, yes, fat that for the anatomically challenged (such as me) can make it difficult to work out where to begin. A few tentative prods, however, reveal where to find the motherlode of rosy pink flesh. With a pea puree, fresh sugar snaps, onion jam and a mint labne on the side, there is also a welcome nod to mum’s roast dinner.

Kingfish, wakame, miso creme fraiche at Coal Cellar and Grill, Hilton Adelaide.

Pork cutlet, roasted parsnips, curry leaves at Coal Cellar and Grill, Hilton Adelaide.

This unpretentious style of cooking, rather than the tricky stuff, is Coal’s strong suit. And sticking with the classics would seem a sensible decision for a restaurant with an audience including plenty of business folk and hotel guests, who head downstairs to a huge, clubby space that is cleverly manipulated with the use of sliding dividers to allow for private functions.

The handsome decor includes plenty of wood panelling, textured glass, leather banquettes and softly glowing mushroom lamps. The crisscross of the tartan carpet is echoed in the smart black-and-white gingham shirts worn by staff.

The Hilton, of course, boasts a long culinary heritage. This was where Cheong Liew hit the top of the national charts at The Grange and the remarkable Simon Bryant oversaw all kitchen operations with his trademark honesty and embrace of local producers.

Some of Bryant’s rigour wouldn’t go astray at Coal where the menu kicks off with the kind of mission statement that could only have come from a marketing department. How else do you equate the promise of “keeping it simple by highlighting the best of South Australia’s produce” with kingfish soaked in (Japanese) gin, ringed in a slurry of shredded wakame touched with soy sauce, drizzled with a dressing of burnt cucumber and leek, then topped with a big blob of miso crème fraiche on each delicate slice. No prizes for guessing the dominant component here. It’s certainly not the fish.

Grilled octopus is marginally better but, once again, overbearing quantities of gochujang, garlic crisps and kewpie do the seafood no favours. And it’s hard to fathom why a caprese-style salad, that relies on the best tomatoes, would still be featuring in winter.

Larger plates pare back the ingredients and are all the better for it. A pork cutlet, from Marino butcher in the market, is a rival for the lamb, a daunting slab of sweet, juice filled meat, particularly where close to the bone or any little pocket of fat. It comes with a simple reduction, a stack of roasted parsnips and a few fried curry leaves that prove to be an inspired match to meat and veg. The only flaw is a thin, dairy-heavy sauce with only a hint of green peppercorn but, served to the side in a copper pot, it can be left alone. When accompanying a sirloin steak that could do with a flavour boost, however, it is more of a problem. The same goes for the mushroom sauce with the eye fillet.

Ruby red chocolate mousse, lemon syrup at Coal Cellar and Grill, Hilton Adelaide.

Three of the four desserts from the latest selection feature elements of both chocolate and berries, again a questionable seasonal choice. A thin disc of bitter chocolate sponge sits below a mousse based on the ruby chocolate that had a moment a few years back. Berry compote and particularly a lemon syrup pull it back from the edge of cloying sweetness.

My recommendation for Coal?

Stick with the mains. Share a side. Everything else can be given the chop.

For more reviews visit delicious.com.au/eatout