The Rob Roy Hotel | SA Weekend restaurant review

A historic watering hole in the city’s south has lured a respected Thai chef to cook in its bistro. It might be unpredictable, but it sure is a crowd-pleaser.

Various dishes by Nu Suandokmai at The Rob Roy Hotel.

Did you hear the one about the Thai chef who walked into the Scottish pub? Except, this story is no joke. In one of the more unpredictable hospitality career shifts of recent times, Nu Suandokmai has taken over the kitchen at the Rob Roy Hotel in the south of the city, a venue best known for its extensive whisky collection.

Both chef and pub have notable histories. The Rob Roy, in Halifax St, is believed to be the second oldest pub in Adelaide.

And Nu? Well, he’s been around a while as well. His eponymous Gouger St restaurant gave many locals their first taste of more authentic, sophisticated Thai cooking. He headed to Sydney, then an overseas hotel, before returning home to a mixed bag of venues, including French diner Cliché. Finally, at Lantern by Nu (still trading after his departure), he returned to his roots and made an old warehouse feel like a backstreet eatery from Bangkok or Chiang Mai. For this new venture, he has tapped into all these experiences.

The dining room at the Rob Roy Hotel is “rough-around-the-edges with a shanty feel that works well,” writes Simon Wilkinson.

The Rob Roy dining room has a rough-around-the-edges, shanty feel that works well with this style of food. Walls clad in rough recycled timber make it feel a bit like sitting in a wooden crate. A padded banquette and pressed metal panelling on the bar add a contrast of classic refinement.

For a midweek evening, it not a bad turnout, with a few family groups, business types and young couples, a mix of demographics no doubt helped by the two different menus available.

One is standard pub grub (schnitzels, steaks and burgers et cetera) at slightly higher than standard pub prices.

Nu’s offering, on the other hand, defies classification. Yes, there are Thai dishes and Thai flavours, but they are only part of the story.

Consider the starters. Tom yum gai soup and oysters with nam jin dressing sit alongside sashimi with Japanese soy and wasabi. Then there’s “popcorn prawn”, bite-sized crumbed fritters filled with a mousse of local banana prawns and sweet corn laid on a garland of rocket leaves. Even the dipping sauce, an aioli, is resolutely non-Asian.

The popcorn prawns are a winner.

Lamb shank blanketed in massaman sauce.

Right beneath is the “Thai-style beef jerky”, a preparation of semi-dried meat that, despite the dodgy name, couldn’t be much more authentic. Slices of steak are marinated in soy and coriander, left to partly dry (traditionally in the sun) and then fried, resulting in a variety of textures from very well-done barbecued meat to somewhere just shy of jerky-style boot leather. Dipped into a sriracha sauce, however, it is a beer snack that would take some beating.

Green curry chicken demonstrates both the importance of making a paste from scratch and the chef’s skill with flavours. That murky coconut-based broth has terrific lingering complexity, maybe a touch more sugar than the Lantern version, but still right in balance. In its depths are chunks of chicken thigh, apple eggplant, lime leaves and other aromatics. I can’t think of a better pub curry.

The squid dish is a strange one, the germ of a good idea let down by detail. If only the seafood had been grilled to order, so it was still hot, and not charred so heavily that some parts were terribly bitter. If only the beans were crisp, the almonds freshly roasted, the stalky leaves left off, and the avocado and lime mousse kept separate or in a smaller quantity. Then you might have something.

Charred squid with avocado and lime mousse.

Nu’s offering defies classification. There are Thai dishes and Thai flavours, but they are only part of the story.

Other mains are pretty much finished before we are brought a large lamb shank, meat not quite cooked to fall-apart stage, blanketed in a massaman sauce that, when combined with a bed of sweet potato, definitely leans towards crowd-pleasing sweetness.

The same goes for the dessert roti, but who cares when you have that rich, flaky pastry rolled pancake-style around a squishy banana filling, with a fluoro green pandan custard underneath. It’s pure joyful, childish indulgence.