Sean's Kitchen, Adelaide, is more branded than personal

Station Rd, Adelaide, subtly corporate.

Sean's Kitchen has an old railway-station brasserie feel with monochrome tiles and mosaic floors.

IT may just be coincidence but within a month, two brash newcomers with lots in common arrived in Adelaide. They talk big. They flash their money around. And both have the air of celebrity about them.

One is Jamie’s Italian, new outpost for everyone’s favourite Essex lad, even if JI has about as much to do with Jamie Oliver as a Bali knock-off has to do with a Louis Vuitton designer stitching away in a Paris atelier.

The other is Sean’s Kitchen, spawn of a lesser celebrity. Expat Brit Sean Connolly, like many before him, has gone down a “branded” consultancy road lending his cred and culinary direction to projects such as The Morrison in Sydney, The Grill in Auckland and, now, Sean’s Kitchen, which is really a restaurant run by casino operator Skycity but doing a sterling job of looking like a stand-alone, non-corporate affair.

On one hand, it’s easy to be cynical about restaurants with absentee figureheads (neither Jamie nor Sean were cooking when I ate at their places). On the other, the profit potential for corporations gives us dining rooms that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and Sean’s certainly looks fabulous: it has an old-world railway station brasserie feel with its monochrome tiles, mosaic floors and soaring barrel ceiling.

On a warm night with cricket at the Adelaide Oval (and therefore a passing throng), customers spilling onto the terrace and a real sense of “something” in the air, you want to be excited by it. Grabbing the menu, with its talk of a “museum of hams”, “itchyban charcoal”, “Grandma’s carrots”, “fire pit” and “artisan sourdough”, you want it all to come to life on the chunky timber table, too. You really do.

But a few hours and a few hundred dollars (for two) later, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Sean’s is just another Food & Beverage Department restaurant, masquerading as something else.

A sommelier with an earpiece is a giveaway, but also practical: music is played at an absurd volume, a sin compounded by dull music curation. But it’s the uniformly lacklustre standard of what’s on the plate that really lets Sean’s down. All very well to have a firepit and expensive Japanese charcoal, but watching chefs cook proteins on a grill with flames leaping through the iron bars, when glowing coals should have ruled, is a tragedy.

And the food we had hoped would convey all that the charcoal/smoke hype suggested? Afraid not.

The best dish is a $26 “salad” of grilled octopus, chickpeas and rocket dressed with white balsamic and creamy feta. Maybe the occy was cooked before they stoked the fire?

Kingfish (ceviche) is sliced too thinly, so the acid has taken it too far in the “cooking” process. At $28, it’s expensive too. Three blackened, overcooked Spencer Gulf prawns, served on a “garlic pernod (sic) butter” with a bit of lemon, are $24. A wet jumble of chargrilled quail, smoked cherry tomatoes and caper berries is a lot better.

A dull scotch fillet — $38 with a pat of “anchovy butter” and nothing else, juiceless, oily, no charcoal evidence at all — shows that it’s not just amateurs with bad home barbecues who cook ordinary steaks. The maccheroni cheese, on the other hand, is excellent.

“Baked New York cheesecake; KI sheep’s milk, wild strawberries, rhubarb” is another case of rhetoric over reality. The cake is bland, the strawberry domestic (not wild) and singular (not plural).

The wine list has many examples from local darlings Ochota Barrels, and SA generally. Staff are competent. But you know how this must end. So much about Sean’s is right except probably the one thing a restaurant really should nail.

Naturally, it’s booming.

Address: Station Road, Adelaide

Phone: [phone] Web: seanskitchen.com.au

Hours: Lunch, dinner daily

Typical prices: Starters $20; mains $40; desserts $16

Summary: Rockpool Bar & Grill Lite

Stars: 2.5 out of 5