Hungry? These are the top food trends you’ll find in Adelaide restaurants in 2022-2023
From the humble crumpet to retro roasted marshmallows – here’s what you’ll find on your plate this year with our top food trends for 2022.
Food & Wine
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From creative crumpets to retro roasted marshmallows, there’s a lot to love about what South Australia’s restaurants are serving up in 2022.
Over the past four months, The Advertiser team of reviewers has been visiting the best restaurants to find SA’s delicious.100. Put all these lunches and dinners together, and different trends emerge. New ingredients are released and chefs find inspiration from what is happening in their own patch and elsewhere in the world. This is what you can expect on your plate this year.
CABBAGE
Even before it was touted as a solution to skyrocketing lettuce prices, the humble cabbage could lay claim to being this year’s star vegetable. The cabbage has long been a favourite with chefs who appreciate its versatility – even the basic green variety can be shredded raw, steamed in parcels, grilled, stir-fried et cetera. Then there are more exotic types, such as the robust savoy and the cute, pointy-headed sugarloaf, a breed that works particularly well when grilled with a brush of miso, like they do at Aurora.
While it makes a wonderful side, cabbage plays the lead role in dishes such as Fugazzi’s fire-scorched cabbage with macadamia, green onion and buckwheat or at Africola, where Duncan Welgemoed grills it while brushing with prawn head butter, then finishes it with a creamy whey and cider sauce, strewn with prawn meat.
“When I think about it, cabbage has really been a bit of a staple in the kitchen for a while,” says Shannon Fleming, chef at Lot 100. He uses wombok to keep up a steady supply of kim-chi, while red cabbage is served with macadamia butter and pepitas as an entree. To accompany a lamb dish, the hardier savoy is charred over a fire pit and then drizzled with an anchovy emulsion like a bagna cauda to roast in the oven.
Like most of his vegetables, Fleming sources his cabbages from Andy Taylor’s biodynamic patch at Ngeringa.
“I’ve had a relationship with Ngeringa for a long time,” he says. “I know exactly where the veggies have come from. I know where everything is in the patch. I trust Andy so that, if the veg is on his list, I know it is in season and at its peak.”
ABALONE
The abalone grown in the waters of Kangaroo Island by aquaculture company Yumbah has become a prized acquisition for high-end restaurants. At Maxwell, Fabian Lehmann attaches delicate strips of poached abalone to the underside of a beautiful shell with a “glue” of Jerusalem artichoke, while Magill Estate includes it in a next-level seafood medley with lobster and burnt tomato.
Justin James at Restaurant Botanic, however, gets the A-plus mark for its paperbark parcel of neatly dissected whole abalone with a sliver of fresh asparagus between each slice, finished with a fermented asparagus puree and abalone liver butter. Swoon.
BOOZELESS BEVERAGES
Influential venues are now devoting equal thought to non-alcoholic drinks as those containing booze. At Restaurant Botanic, for instance, “The Temperance” is a matched selection of juices, infusions and ferments promising the complex and adventurous combinations found in the elite wine pairings.
Osteria Oggi offers a quartet of mocktails, complete with tasting notes, such as the plum sour (“winter plums/tart/foaming”) or a passionfruit gimlet made with native passion berries, juniper, fennel and pink peppercorns.
And the new Africola Canteen in Norwood has brought in drinks guru Mark Reginato (Hellbound/Connect Vines/Man of Spirit) to create a constantly updated list of kombuchas, shrubs and seltzers.
CRUMPETS
Yes, there is a place for the standard supermarket crumpet, especially when its craters are overflowing with melted butter and honey.
However, our best chefs have discovered that a crumpet fresh from the pan is a thing of beauty and that all those holes also work wonderfully with more savoury flavours.
Top of the class is Scott Huggins whose honey-brushed crumpet loaded with smoked trout butter and fluorescent pearls of roe has become a Magill Estate signature.
At Topiary, Kane Pollard gives his crumpet a dollop of fermented tomato, before topping with smoked mussels, while Shannon Fleming at Lot 100 has mini versions with tart plum and a lardo wrapping. The beef fat waffle at Maxwell also deserves a mention.
MARSHMALLOWS
More childhood memories, this time of campfires and roasting marshmallows.
Star of Greece adds delicious house-made grilled marshmallows to a dessert of poached rhubarb, choc-coconut soil, caramelised ice-cream and raspberry floss.
But arkhé takes the biscuit, so to speak, with its take on the American campfire treat “s’more”, here a combination of dark malted rye biccy, smoked chocolate and rhubarb marshmallow.
MURRAY COD
An impressive alternative to the usual salmon/barramundi/snapper/whiting choices, this white-fleshed fish is farmed in the Riverland (as well as interstate) and completely sustainable.
Eleni’s, the Greek restaurant at Renmark winery Mallee Estate, celebrates its regional hero ingredients with perfectly cooked Murray cod fillets napped with a butter sauce containing plenty of local capers.
At CBD diner eleven, Callum Hann’s kitchen team matches the fish with poached mussels, pearl barley and an intriguing yellow bean sauce, while The Lane’s Tom Robinson favours a classic chardonnay beurre blanc piqued with caviar.
ROAST CHICKEN
Troubled times call for comfort food and meals don’t come more soothing than the nostalgia of a roast chicken dinner.
Our favourite, complete with bread sauce and a terrific chicken gravy mum would be proud of, is found at the Scenic Hotel.
Elsewhere, Extra Chicken Salt has created a whole restaurant around the rotisserie chook (complete with potato and gravy), while Brendan Wessels at Aurora has used it as inspiration for an intensely flavoured roast chicken cream, scorched onion and salt-baked potato.
KINGFISH
Plates of raw kingfish sashimi/crudo/ceviche continue to demand a place on the starter lists of so many restaurants it is almost a (pleasant) surprise not to see it. That said, the best versions (Georges on Waymouth, Fino at Seppeltsfield and Press for example) are still delightful.
Far more interesting, however, is the creative uses that chefs are finding for less familiar parts of the fish, particularly the collar and wing, where an abundance of pearly white flesh is hidden among the structure of bone and cartilage.
arkhé’s fire-roasted collar in a sticky savoury varnish is superb, as are the salt and pepper wings that Tony Carroll partners with a soy and tamarind broth at Fishbank.
Other places to find excellent wings include Peel St and Kosho Japanese in North Adelaide.
PORK CUTLET
The soaring price of beef and lamb may well be a factor but the big-ticket meat item on many menus is changing to a pork cutlet or chop.
The best versions are likely to be taken from a free-range, heritage breed pig, often aged and/or brined, grilled over a flame, and accompanied by something with a little sharpness.
Clare Valley bistro Seed has one of the best, perhaps served with apple, quince and a reduction sauce bolstered with marinated prunes.
Tom Tilbury at Press has a more subtle match of eggplant and mustard seeds, while arkhé’s Jake Kellie favours plum and pickled currants.
BOOKINGS
Covid restrictions forced most restaurants into making significant changes to the way they do business. The prime dinner booking of 7pm is becoming a thing of the past, replaced by a choice of 6pm (or even 5.30pm) and 8pm as venues look to fit in two sittings.
The financial impact of late cancellations and no-shows also means that many establishments are now asking for a deposit or charging cancellation fees.
Shobosho, for example, charges $35 per person for cancellations less than one day in advance.
It isn’t likely to be long before some others join Restaurant Botanic in asking for full upfront payment, like a ticket to the footy or theatre.
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