Featuring: Ballaboosta, Arkhe, Botanic Gardens Restaurant…

THE opening of a second suburban Ballaboosta has given an enormous culinary boost to Adelaide’s eastern suburbs, given that it is often pretty well packed even on “quiet” days.
The original Ballaboosta, which continues in the CBD, looked like an oversize garage – in fact it was once a laundromat – with customers spilling onto the street when the weather was fine. But when the weather closed in, so did the foldaway doors and inside became one of the coziest dining spaces in town, sitting almost on top of the huge wood oven in which much of its menu of Lebanese comfort food was cooked.
The new incarnation, in a former corner café once a post-hike coffee and lunch spot for Adelaide Hills walkers, occupies a much larger site, double the size of its city sibling, but still with an open kitchen dominated by a large wood oven and still with a sense of comfortable homeliness. Ballaboosta is a Yiddish term for a mother who holds her family together with love and affection, and that’s the warmth that infuses this restaurant.
Restaurant owner Naj Moubayed’s mother, Betty, is the ‘ballaboosta’ in charge of the kitchen, hence a section on the menu labelled Betty’s Kitchen that features dishes such as enormous, chargrilled king prawns cooked in herb butter with a lemon and herb dressing, or kafta, finely-ground lamb mince skewers with garlic, lemon and mint.
Start with classic Lebanese mezes, salads such as a super crunchy fresh fatoush, a very traditional Lebanese dish, or brilliant little pastries called sambousik, stuffed with minced beef and toasted pine nuts.
There are hearty soups such as spicy lentil with rice and spinach, then main courses such as samak harra – literally hot fish, oven baked and served with tahini and chilli sauce, or a wood-fired warm chicken salad. Everything comes with gorgeous little pillows of puffed-up pita bread, straight from the wood oven.
On a sunny morning you can sit on the vine-covered verandah for a terrific Lebanese-style breakfast, perhaps enjoying wood-fired shakshuka or Mediterranean poached eggs with rainbow beetroot and chargrilled carrot.
Ballaboosta, 540 Glynburn Road, Burnside. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday, breakfast and lunch Sunday. Phone (08) 8102 4157.
Two restaurants that have opened in Adelaide in the past year have suddenly raised the city’s gastronomic bar to new heights, with Restaurant Botanic and Arkhe providing new levels of excitement for local diners.
Both are reincarnations of much-admired former restaurants. What was once Stone’s Throw restaurant on busy Norwood Parade has been gutted and totally transformed by designers Studio Gram. Arkhe occupies a large space but, unlike its predecessor, brittle noise levels have been much contained, and a distinctive character has been created through the use of black salvaged railway sleepers and a general singed look that fits the fire-focus of the restaurant.

There are several dining zones, the pick of which are the 18 counter seats overlooking the kitchen where everything is cooked over open fire by chef Jake Kellie and his team.
This is no mean feat, with no gas or electricity used in the kitchen, but Kellie has drawn on his experience as head chef of Michelin-starred Burnt Ends, a modern barbecue restaurant consistently ranked among the world’s best 50 barbecue restaurants.
At the heart of it all is the dual cavity wood oven, weighing 3.5 tonnes, which also provides the coals for the adjoining four elevation grills. Start with fragile little tarts of molten duck liver parfait and pickled blackberry, a signature dish borrowed from Burnt Ends, before moving on to dishes such as roasted Port Lincoln kingfish collar or wood-grilled southern rock lobster with brown butter, garlic and caper sauce.
Arkhe, 127 The Parade, Norwood. Open for lunch Tuesday to Sunday, dinner daily. Phone (08) 330 3300.
Under chef Paul Baker, the Botanic Gardens Restaurant, a gorgeous pavilion in the heart of the botanic gardens, drew on all the surrounding edible resources and won much acclaim.
Now American-born chef Justin James has drawn on his experience at world renowned restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park, Noma in Copenhagen and Vue de monde in Melbourne to create a rarified and exquisite tasting menu, harvesting flowers, leaves, seeds and roots and experimenting with them in ferments and pickles to create The Garden Trail featuring at least 20 different flavour combinations – such as marron tail poached in marron butter and then grilled in a bundle of native leaves, accompanied by a corn sauce and fermented chilli oil.
This sort of dining is right up there in price, up to $295 for the Garden Trail menu, but the wine pairings have taken the spotlight, starting at $175 and soaring to $800 for the “Crème de la Crème” selection of bucket-list wines – the most expensive pairing list in the country. Corkage is a relatively modest $100.
Restaurant Botanic, Plane Tree Drive, Adelaide. Open for lunch Sunday, dinner Thursday to Saturday. Phone (08) 8223 3526.