SA Weekend restaurant review — Meat & Wine Co

A global steakhouse chain has come to Adelaide with an eye-catching design and the best chips ever, writes Simon Wilkinson.

Meat & Wine Co. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

We live in a world obsessed with superlatives and rankings. Who is number one? The prettiest? The rudest? The most likely to succeed? The greatest President in the history of America? You get the drift.

Such proclamations, however dubious, can be guaranteed to ignite a barrage of argument and counter-argument in which any context is lost as rapidly as the audience swells.

On that basis, today’s review should be a chart-topper as it contains my vote for SA’s Best Chips and Worst Squid in the one hit. It also has a fine piece of aged rib steak that might, unfortunately, be forgotten in the rush to commend and complain.

Meat & Wine Co is a Sydney-based restaurant brand that already has multiple venues in Melbourne and Perth, as well as overseas. For Adelaide, it has taken over a large slice of the ground level of heritage-listed Elders House in Currie Street and thrown what must be a considerable sum into making it unrecognisable.

From the outside, the building’s grand facade, the stylish awning above the door and even the corporate-sounding name come straight from the streets of Manhattan. The interior, however, is a different story.

Ribeye steak at Meat & Wine Co, Adelaide

Meat & Wine Co owner/founder Bradley Michael was raised and started his business in South Africa, and this background is used for inspiration.

The design uses enough rope to rig the First Fleet, most prominently in a spectacular row of private dining “huts” fashioned like a giant macramé project.

There’s more rope in the red twists installed near the entrance and elaborate cords screening the windows that look like they might have been taken from the set of Downton Abbey.

The rest of the room has the polished timber, glass and steel of a contemporary brasserie, other than the vaguely safari-style print of the upholstery in the booths.

On a midweek evening, tables are full and it’s a varied bunch: young friends with a pram; a work celebration; some diners in shorts or jeans, others in suits.

That mix is a fair reflection of the Meat & Wine Co formula that runs from a sub-$30 burger or piece of rump to the rarefied wagyu ribeye at $86 and a further selection of aged beef priced by weight and displayed in a cabinet next to the kitchen.

Meat & Wine Co. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

The bloke who shows us the ropes, so to speak, is an old hand, as smooth as the Argentinian malbec he pours, but the service is uneven. When we ask a different waiter for a glass of a particular pinot, he scours the list uncertainly and struggles with pronunciations.

An entree of wagyu tartare is delivered within a few minutes of placing our order. The beef is commendably hand-cut rather than minced and formed into a loose heap with blobs of smoked egg yolk on top. The texture of the meat is excellent but its flavour is overwhelmed by the pickled cucumber (cornichon) and juice that has either been added in too great a quantity, mixed in earlier in the night to save time, or both.

Did I say worst squid? Perhaps that’s unfair but, given we’re not in a daggy front bar, it must rank in the bottom five.

Meat ageing cabinet at Meat & Wine Co, Adelaide. Picture: Alex Aleshin

Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

Thick tiles of white, flabby, bland seafood from goodness knows where are coated in a heavy Sichuan-spiced crumb and accompanied by cucumber and a harsh nam jim sauce.

With an ample supply of brilliant locally caught southern calamari available, this simply doesn’t pass muster in Adelaide.

A 480g aged ribeye to share is sound value at $76 given the quality of the meat and the time put into it.

Carved from the bone and into chunky slices, the beef has a heavy charred crust, is beautifully seasoned, is rosy pink medium rare on the inside and has a thin seam of fat on the rim that pumps the pleasure factor to another level. I’m salivating thinking about it now.

And the chips? Each one of them is so uniformly, brilliantly crisp outside and fluffy inside that you’d almost believe they were fried individually. The seasoning, again, is flawless. I really can’t recall having better.

Of course, we scoffed the lot of them, making dessert something of a challenge.

A New York-style cheesecake, served as an individual dome rather than a slice from something larger, is cloaked in a strawberry coulis with fresh and poached berries scattered around. Not the best, not the worst – just a little too much.