Featuring: The Guardsman, Jasmin, The Lane Vineyard Restaurant…

ADELAIDE’S SkyCity casino has done us all a favour with the restoration of Adelaide Railway Station’s former Great Dining Hall, transforming a once grand space more recently degraded to a storage area with a $6 million make-over.
Now renamed The Guardsman, it looks far more stylish than it ever did when it was built in 1928. The once heavy Art Deco basic styling has been lightened up by design firm du jour Studio Gram, responsible for many of Adelaide’s new wave of restaurants, with luxurious woodwork, sleek leather upholstery, café chairs, tiled floors and more. It looks good.
And even though the original dining room once hosted the august members of Adelaide’s Beefsteak and Burgundy Club it’s unlikely its menu ever extended much further than the classic staples of 1950’s Anglo-centric cuisine, which really wasn’t up to much.
That’s now been put well into the past by inaugural chef Luke Brabin who, having worked his way across restaurants in Australia, China and Japan, with chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, has started with a thoroughly contemporary menu using entirely South Australian produce to produce pub classics but some with Middle Eastern, Indian and Asian-inspired touches.
Start with kingfish ceviche or terrific local San Jose salumi, then perhaps a Mayura Station waygu burger, Coorong mullet with young coconut salad, or lamb shoulder with cous cous and lemon (a dish for two to share). There’s a good range and all very well priced.
And although those Beef and Burgundy chaps (and they were all chaps) would have loved their wine, they didn’t have the choice they now have here and would go straight past the ‘small but OK’ limited wine list to the SkyCity master list of 7500 labels curated by sommelier Jimmy Parham. And where once they might have had two or three beers to choose from, now there’s around 20 on tap. The Guardsman, Adelaide Railway Station, 125 North Terrace, Adelaide. Open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday; phone (08) 8212 2811.
One Adelaide restaurant where social distancing has caused very little disruption is Indian favourite Jasmin, which has long been noted as much for its well-spaced tables as for its calm and comfortable surroundings.
The fact that it has this year clocked up exactly four decades of providing some of the finest Indian food in Australia is a tribute to the Singh family who founded it, now headed by matriarch Mrs Anant Singh AM, with son Amrik and daughter Sheila undertaking day to day management.
Its discreet basement location has helped make it a favourite of both captains of industry and politicians alike, with one former state premier once declaring that he would be happy to eat his last meal there.
Not surprisingly it’s especially popular with visiting Indian cricket teams, which helps account for the extraordinary cricket bat collection on its walls, along with a collection of Tom Gleghorn paintings that overlook a splendid dining room featuring glossy mahogany tables, low lights and sumptuous style.

One of the reasons Jasmin continues to thrive is that both its cooking and service standards remain of such consistent high quality. Signature dishes such as its outstanding beef vindaloo and even more fiery chicken tindaloo have never left the menu, its tandoori dishes such as Punjabi lamb tandoori or tandoori mushrooms are exemplary, and once you start on the entrees you wonder why you’ve ordered anything more. Watch for daily specials such as the pan-fried garfish dusted with masala spices.
Little wonder that visiting celebrity chef Marco Pierre White recently described a meal at Jasmin as “without question the best Indian meal of my life. Where Mrs Singh is a genius is she doesn’t believe in change, she believes in refinement.” Jasmin, 31 Hindmarsh Square, Adelaide. Open for lunch Thursday and Friday, dinner Tuesday to Saturday; phone (08) 8223 7837.
After a six-month hiatus, The Lane Vineyard Restaurant has reopened its doors, with a new chef, new menu and new emphasis on home-grown produce.
If the view was the only good thing about The Lane, just 3km from Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills, it would probably be enough. It has one of the best winery restaurant locations in South Australia, overlooking a landscape of neatly tended cabernet sauvignon vineyards, rolling hills, gum trees, dams and grazing cows. But there’s more to this sleek combined restaurant-cellar door than that.
New chef Tom Robinson, who has taken over from long-standing chef James Brinklow, has a passion for local produce and a nose-to-tail philosophy that are both front and centre on his new Provenance menu that features dishes such as spring vegetable tart with soft egg and ricotta, Wiltipoll lamb with saltbush, olives and carrot, or cured Hirasama kingfish with apple and cucumber. Menus range from three to seven courses, with an option of paired wines.
Robinson has plenty on which to draw: a selection of micro-herbs including mustard leaf, cress, borage, nasturtium and veggies are due for harvest, whilst quince, red delicious apple, fig and pear trees are maturing in the estate gardens. There’s a flock of 40 grass-fed Wiltipoll and Dorper breeding ewes, whose lambs are raised in paddocks next to the winery and restaurant, while the estate dams are full of yabbies and rainbow and brown trout to be featured on future menus. Plans to produce estate eggs and honey are underway. The Lane, Ravenswood Lane, Hahndorf. Open for lunch daily. Phone (08) 8388 1250.