It’s foraged food and garden blooms at Topiary

TOPIARY serves breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea under French provincial-style sandstone arbors amid greenery, and chef Kane Pollard’s menus make fine garden-time reading.

Topiary’s leatherjacket with fresh beans, peas and black garlic aioli

APART from a great collection of camellias, what do you find in a beautiful nursery on the high side of Tea Tree Gully?

Gracefully shaped shrubs, yes. And even better for a non-green thumb like me, is Topiary food fashioned to reflect the gorgeous gardens.

The restaurant in the Newman’s Nursery serves breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, at crisply dressed tables inside or out under French provincial-style sandstone arbors by ornate gates, flowers, and greenery everywhere. In full sun or partial shade, it’s a lovely soft patch compared to the more common sharp surfaces of today’s cafes.

Chef/owner Kane Pollard’s menus make fine garden-time reading. The wine list includes notes on each wine from a “floral, fresh and peachy” semillon to an Adelaide Hills sangiovese “emulating the great wines Chianti, grown at altitude”.

House made haloumi, garden root veg and grilled grapefruit

The food, based on what his team has foraged, is made from scratch, down to house-made bread and cultured butter.

Chicken liver pate, just a tad sloppy, sits prettily in a deep pot scattered with fine batons of crispy apple. Even the haloumi is made in-house, served like fallen logs under spring vegetables shaved into petals, with grilled grapefruit for tang.

Then, a surprise palate cleanser of fresh ruby plum sorbet crowned with honeycomb.

The surprise palate cleanser of fresh ruby plum sorbet crowned with honeycomb

We could go for beef, pork belly or chicken, but choose light, and brilliant, fish. The Coorong mullet is ever so lightly smoked, under ribbons of fennel tangled with wide inky pasta, all peppered with citrus zing. It’s one of the best fish meals in memory. A leatherjacket special is simpler stuff, yet each ingredient sings, from the sweet fillet on crunchy beans and fresh-picked peas to the plop of black garlic aioli ready to load with each bite.

Wisely, we share celeriac panna cotta with mud cake and a fetching scatter of rhubarb, sweet crumbs, puffed rice and honeycomb. It’s large, rich, and after a time a bit heavy on the savoury note to be enjoyable for just one.

It’s to be a perennial garden-lunch memory, with two stunning white camellias now in pots on our front porch.