Before our trip to Adelaide, we dutifully went through the Australian Gourmet Traveller guide for Adelaide, and Celcius caught our eye for a special night out since the it didn't seem feasible to go to the other places that were recommended (Penfolds appeared too expensive, the Manse was too far away, no one from Vincenzo picked up the phone nor replied emails, and we couldn't get dinner bookings at Chianti).
The dinner started off on an interesting note, with the bread coming with smoked butter in a jar - when we opened it, the smoke came out. The flavour of the butter was slightly smoky, and we were feeling pretty positive about the evening.
We also ordered a serve of pork crackling on the side, and were rather surprised to see full-on pork skin. But this was so light and crispy, not too oily, and excellent with my riesling. Beer would have been much better though.
A close up of the air bubbles in the pork skin.
The first course was "blue swimmer crab, green gazpacho, pomegranate" (the chef must be a man of few words). I had no idea what the leaves were. This was refreshing, but slightly monolingual in terms of flavour, with it tasting like a tomato broth that happened to have a crab swimming in it.
Next up: Venison tartare, beetroot, cured egg, herb emulsion. This was interesting because of the raw venison, but there weren't enough herbs or spices to make the dish anything more than a basic composition.
4th: Market fish, squid ink, potato, fennel, calamari.
The market fish (I forget what it was now - bream? barramundi?) was simply grilled. So were the fennel and calamari. The flavour of the squid ink didn't come through either. Frankly, I would expect something a whole lot more exciting than grilled fish for a degustation meal.
5th: Quail, boudin noir, apple, bacon. Now, this was a really pretty composition, but the quail was over done, and we didn't take to the pig's blood tofu.
6th: Coorong Angus sirloin with baby root vegetables.This looked like a simple dish stacked in a complicated way.
When this arrived, we declared it as the most enjoyable dish of the evening, although it was something that any other decent restaurant could have done well.
One of the desserts, however, was completely different story. I'm tempted to suggest that the chef forget about meats and veggies, and just focus on this dessert because this was pretty mindblowing. This was called lemon curd, blackberries, white chocolate and passionfruit. WOW. The lemon curd was dehydrated, and melted in our mouths. The sorbet was deliciously tangy and balanced the white chocolate fabulously.
This was called "peach and raspberries tart, chamomile". Not sure where the chamomile was, since we couldn't taste it, but this was back to normal again for us - the pastry was too soft, and it was just another pretty composition without any wow factor.
Although it was very pretty.
We threw in another Tim Adams Botrytis Riesling, and the bill was pretty...for lack of a better word, expensive, especially when we were expecting to be wowed. The service was not that great - there was only one waitress who seemed to know what was going on, and she was flanked by one rather slow woman and another rather dismissive man. Unfortunately one excellent person can't work the entire floor. All in, we weren't too disappointed - the food was fresh, to be fair, and pretty decent, but definitely not worth a repeat visit and certainly not stunning enough to warrant taking the degustation menu.
http://www.celsiusrestaurant.com.au/
