Restaurant review: Stones’ Throw

The bold and disparate food at this upmarket Adelaide restaurant is let down by the peripherals.

Stones Throw. Picture: Keturah de Klerk

Video stores begat … pharmacies. Or designer gift shops. Internet cafes succumbed to tattoo parlours and juice bars. Restaurants? They just get recycled as restaurants.

We’re back on The Parade, main artery of inner-Adelaide’s Norwood, at a site once home to the ridiculously named Grace, The Establishment. Fast forward a few years and 127 is still a restaurant. Stone’s Throw occupies the same L-shaped footprint: high-table, wine-bar style seating out front and atrium dining room at the rear. Importantly at this time of year, the entire back is open to a glorious courtyard, blurring the line between “in” and “out”.

If you’re “in”, you’re probably at a white marble table in a bright, white room, under white lights, with white floor tiles and white bentwood chairs. A few rugs break up this Arctic monochrome but more effort with the ambience — warming music, for instance — would lift the vibe.

On a Tuesday night, Stone’s Throw looks almost empty from the street. Out back, where diners congregate, it’s a menu some would call mongrel, others pedigreed Australian. The chef not only does different dishes with disparate cultural and flavour profiles; he has fun pairing the leitmotifs of different cuisines on the one plate, too, a freestyle approach that mostly works.

The consistent element in ST’s food is Asian: big, boisterous flavours, often Thai, give the food its attitude. The go-to dish, “salmon sashimi”, is thick slices of just-cured Atlantic salmon dressed extravagantly with blobs of tahini yoghurt, drizzles of tahini sauce, candied walnuts, sumac, salmon roe and a variety of fresh herbs and finely diced red onion. A little goes a long way but what to accompany it with? Rice? Couscous? Bread? The answer is nothing, apparently.

A delicious bowl of silken tofu with yuxiang sauce — ginger, garlic, Sichuan pepper, black vinegar — gets broad beans and fermented chilli on top, a shameless pinch from Andrew McConnell’s Supernormal book.

Excellent asparagus with black sesame, crumbled nori, puffed rices and a miso/chilli butter gets a soft-boiled egg split on top. The produce is very good, and so are the flavours, but a call for bread yields slices of chargrilled toast and it’s not quite right. These are the refinements the place needs to work on to make it a more user-friendly experience.

The same “strong fundamentals, clumsy execution” hampers the bigger dishes. TFC (Thai fried chicken) consists of good fried pieces of bird (provenance undeclared) buried beneath a mound of stalky herbs, huge chunks of cucumber, dried mild and large fresh chilli, snake beans and other stuff. It’s too unrefined to call a salad, and why would anyone include whole kaffir lime leaves in such an assembly?

Many of the same elements are repeated in a red duck curry, made in a northern Thai style without coconut milk. The confit meat and gravy are excellent, but again it’s mounded with massive fronds of different herbs, pineapple, apple, pea eggplant and peanuts. A drizzle of coconut cream finishes the dish. And call me old-fashioned, but where’s the rice? It’s as if the kitchen isn’t really thinking about how the dish will be consumed.

A lemongrass/vanilla crème brûlée, served with roasted pineapple and its caramel, is terrific. If only it had come out of the coolroom earlier.

So the good news about this place is that there is loads of potential and the value factor is strong. The bad? There’s always another restaurant dreamer waiting to move in.

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at a glance

Address: 127 The Parade, Norwood Contact: [phone] stones-throw.com.au Hours: Lunch, dinner Tue-Sun Typical prices: Smaller $18; larger $35; desserts $12 like this? try ... Peel Street, Adelaide Summary: Loads of potential

Photography Keturah de Klerk