Hill of Grace, Adelaide Oval: restaurant review

This catering company’s expensive restaurant is lifeless and ill-informed. I can’t give it even half a star.

TWAM-20160220 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 20 Feb 2016 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION FEE APPLIES Hill of Grace Adelaide Pic : Randy larcombe

So, here’s the thing I like about Hill of Grace: watching the Twenty20 cricket team train on the Adelaide Oval at sunset with a glass of Pewsey Vale in hand. And here are the things I don’t mind about this restaurant, which looks and acts like a business incubated in a catering company boardroom (and feels like a day out in a corporate box at the stadium, which is pretty much what it is): reasonable wine prices, including the excellent Deviation Road Loftia sparkler at $14 a glass; an amuse-bouche of fresh oyster, fingerlime and lemon foam; a small dish of baby marron with an aromatic Asian broth and citrus gel.

And now for the things I don’t like about a restaurant named for Australia’s second most famous red wine, the association with which the Henschke family really should have a good hard think about…

Let’s start with the dining room: bland, lifeless, beige-on-beige, with monitors projecting images of the rustic Henschke winery. It’s like the function room your sister was married in 16 years ago. The greeting is perfunctory, a clue to the service to come: myriad waiters assigned to each table, some of whom care, others who show little intuition in relation to their craft (lingering empty plates and glasses, four waiters idling at the pass, glass and cutlery dropped on tiled floors…)

No suggestion of a glass of red with our (lacklustre) meat courses, or something sweeter with dessert. No sommelier on duty (“A few of us here know a bit about wine – I’ll ask someone about the riesling for you”). Let’s not forget the restaurant’s name.

The nexus between Adelaide Oval’s huge catering division and this dining room is so transparent: uniforms with the restaurant’s name embroidered on the chest and “Audi Stadium Club” across the shoulders. Food-service dinner rolls with hard, biscuity crusts; too-soft butter, on the turn; dated crockery/cutlery; cheap, synthetic napery. Contracts get in the way of hospitality, conflicting with the local-hero ethos. So there’s Coca-Cola Amatil water and beer from a Japanese multinational. What about Adelaide’s iconic brewer?

The kitchen fuses Filipino food traditions with a contemporary, if unnecessarily complex approach. Indigenous Australian ingredients are everywhere. Some of it is fine – sinigang, a sour Filipino soup here made with native lemongrass, marron and radishes, works well enough, if you discount undercooked shallot – but the brown, mucoid gloop that passes for a pig liver sauce smothering duck sausage and shimeji mushrooms is not. Neither is too-rare kangaroo used in kare kare, a slow-cooked Filipino stew enriched with peanut butter, in this case distinguished by raw, harsh spice. It’s just not a pleasure to eat.

Dark chocolate ganache tart is fine, too, but I’m not sure about the native pepper berry, and certainly not in an ice cream with all sorts of little wafers and meringue batons for architectural complexity.

The menu uses a lot of Filipino vocabulary which, for most of us, raises questions. (Why not a glossary of terms such as longanisa, inasal and ginataan?) Despite a verbal from a waiter on local produce, the menu includes just one fish dish, farmed rainbow trout. The cheese board consists of three cow’s milk cheeses; it’s all moo, no bleat. And did I mention the $15 sides? This is an expensive joint, in the same $ bracket as, say, Melbourne’s Dinner by Heston or Sydney’s Bennelong, and you are not even farewelled at the door.

I’m not sure the world is ready for this particular fusion just yet. HoG occupies some kind of sad, ill-informed contemporary fine dining void; it’s like the rest of the restaurant world doesn’t exist. I’m trying hard to think of someone I’d recommended it to. I just can’t.

Address: Adelaide Oval, Adelaide

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

Hours: Lunch Fri; dinner Tue-Sat

Typical prices: Lunch $85/$105; dinner $105 à la carte; eight-course degustation $175, plus wine $295

Summary: Out for a duck

Stars out of five: 0