SA Weekend restaurant review – Five Regions at The Adelaide Oval Hotel
An Adelaide Oval restaurant promising to showcase a winery and its region needs to make more of the home ground advantage, writes Simon Wilkinson.
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How do you get your name inscribed on one of the honour boards hanging around Adelaide Oval? Win a medal? Score the most runs? Kick the most goals? If you are passionate about cricket or footy – and why would you be here otherwise – its best players are worthy of permanent recognition.
The board hanging inside the door at Five Regions, part of the Oval Hotel development, has nothing to do with sport. Instead, it records for posterity the partners in a project that, on face value, challenges some basic assumptions about what a restaurant should do.
It works like this. Every two months Five Regions teams with a winery, selects five or six of its best bottles and creates a matching bespoke menu that also celebrates the food and landscape of the surrounding area. When the time is up, they start again.
Maxwell (McLaren Vale), Jim Barry (Clare), The Lane (Adelaide Hills) and Wynns (Coonawarra) have all featured previously in Five Regions since it opened in September last year. If that seems a fairly mainstream representation of the state’s wine fraternity, one lacking the more innovative or rebellious types, then you need to remember where we are.
Tucked away discretely at the far end of the larger Bespoke eatery/bar, Five Regions is only vaguely discernible through a glass wall and gauze curtain. While still offering a view across the hallowed turf to make the hearts of sports junkies beat faster, its well-spaced white-clothed tables are set up for intimate conversation rather than any large-scale barracking.
The well-drilled service brigade – from an immaculate manager to those delivering food and beverage – ensure you will never be lacking attention. The smallest of details have been considered, such as the pebble left to signify who wants sparkling rather than still water.
The current menu, for June and July, is devoted to Yalumba and the Barossa Valley, though for head chef Daniel Simpson, who arrived just a few months ago after a background in Sydney hotel kitchens, finding the “stunning regional produce” that is trumpeted has understandably been a challenge.
The connection is strongest in the snacks at the start. Blushing slices of smoked duck pastrami are inspired both by the aromas of the cooperage at Yalumba and the Barossa’s reputation for smallgoods. Fried shitake dumplings and mushroom XO come with a story about an event at the winery.
Larger plates begin with poached and grilled octopus tentacle laid across a daffodil-yellow pond of fermented sweetcorn juice. A scattering of fried speck is a reliable crowd-pleaser, while discs of watermelon radish add colour and freshness – two qualities in short supply when so many elements across the meal rely heavily on a blender.
A luxurious braised and pressed log of pork jowl is encased in a panko and rice cracker crumb casing with plenty of snap, crackle and pop. As croquettes go, this one is extra special, but does it really need four different purees/sauces, including roasted apple, prune and a jus given extra lip-sticking richness through the addition of smoked eel? Bringing dabs of them all together for a balanced mouthful takes the skill of a renaissance painter.
Cauliflower cream and a red wine reduction partner tenderloin from Cape Grim (Tasmania). The disc of meat is also topped with jerusalem artichoke chips and a clever layer of pickled shitake, both of them outshining surprisingly dull slices of Western Australian truffle. Doesn’t exactly scream Barossa, does it?
The pear tarte tatin features fruit that has been caramelised to a glossy, deep brown but is undermined by a puff pastry base that is still raw at the middle. It comes with a delicate pear sorbet and biscuit crumb.
This set menu is $140 for five courses which puts it up with our culinary heavy hitters. The paired wines, at $85, are listed as optional, but given their exceptional quality, and that the matches are the point of the exercise, it is a worthwhile investment. The grenache and a graceful, medium-weight shiraz, in particular, may change your perception of Barossa reds.
But the food? For a restaurant that puts such an emphasis on regionality, I reckon it has missed the boat. While technically sound, clever in places, the cooking has that ubiquitous, universal feel of top-end hotels everywhere. The mates I went with to Five Regions couldn’t have been fuller in their praise but I’m not about to put it on the honour board yet.
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