Urban Bistro is good. Really good. Like, rock my world-good. Like, lick my plate and stab the waiter if he tries to take it too soon-sort of good (sorry). I first tried out this newcomer to the Adelaide scene for breakfast, and I left fairly satisfied, but curious to see the dinner menu. A week before my husband Adam and I left Australia to move back to Chicago, we finally got our chance to try it out…and then we moaned all the way home that we hadn’t eaten at Urban more over the past year and a half. Fresh, locally grown food cooked perfectly. That is Urban.
I started with Urban’s own take on beef tartar: sugar cured wagyu, slow cooked egg, capers, brioche, cornichons and cabernet dressing ($18.50 AUD). This was perfect. The sweet beef with the rich egg yolk, sour cornichons with the salty capers–it’s like the dish managed to hit all my taste buds at once and gave them each a personalized, delicious massage. Hot damn, this was gonna be a good meal!
My fellow gastronomer, Jess, started with the snapper cake with lobster mayo, creamed corn and samphire ($18.50 AUD). You might remember samphire from a previous dinner I had at the Hundred Eaves. If you don’t remember, samphire is a branched herb that grows on the rocks on seashores with the help of the salt spray. To me, they look like tiny, salty asparagus, and they worked really well with this dish. The snapper cake tasted so savory, it could have been any delicious, fat-laden meat in the cake, which really made me happy because snapper is much healthier than my favorite fat-laden meat (pork).
Another tried the heirloom tomato tart with buffalo mozzarella ($17.50 AUD), which was great. It tasted like a mini pizza with a lot of really good cheese melting all over the place–a very good thing.
Adam’s appetizer was my favorite because it was delicious and the most creative–a roast caramel chili pork with blue swimmer crab salad served with a green mango sorbet ($19.50 AUD). This Asian-inspired dish was delicious, colorful, and the perfect combination of rich and light with the pork and the sorbet. I loved this one.
We opened a bottle of red right before the mains came (we started with a white blend, but I was so enamored by the food, I can’t remember what it was!). This was from a Barossa Valley wine producer, Two Hands, and it was their 2006 Angels Share Shiraz, but it appears that the grapes for this particular one came from the McLaren Vale wine region. It was perfect for a novice red drinker like myself–soft with spices like cinnamon and clove, and a beautiful finish. It was very easy to drink and turned this great meal into one of those meals where you lose yourself in the food and the company.
I was hankering for some beef with my main, so I went for the roast wagyu leg steak with caramelized shallots, braised brisket and sauce bercy ($34.50 AUD), which was a really rich red wine brown sauce that went perfect with the meat. The leg steak was tender, the brisket was even more tender, and I love red wine with meat, so I was a happy gal with this one.
Jess went with the roasted snapper as her main ($29.00 AUD), and once again, it was delicious. It wasn’t as overwhelmingly delicious as the other dishes we had, but it still held its own.
Jason got adventurous with the fried quail breast and pisatchios in bean curd and fondant potato ($28.50 AUD). I love the presentation of the dish, and the Asian-inspired flavors really went well with the quail.
Adam’s dish was also beautifully presented and seriously delicious–huge, caramelized sea scallops with house-cured pork sausage, minted peas and frisee ($28.50 AUD). The sausage was wrapped in almost a red wine gelee, and just the combination of the sweet scallops with the salty pork and minty peas really bounced around in your mouth. That is what I liked most about Urban–even their rich dishes managed to have a lightness to them, and they never served you too much or too little food. It was all just perfect. Wow, I sound like a lovesick teenager. I even saved the napkin from the dinner…kidding…sort of…
Of course, I had to get dessert, so I went with the banana souffle cake with banana yoghurt ice cream and hot dark chocolate sauce ($17.80 AUD). Once again, this was delicious. The souffle was light and yet intensely banana-flavored, and paired with the tangy yoghurt and the rich dark chocolate, the dish was perfectly balanced. If you live in Adelaide or are just passing through, go to Urban for lunch or dinner. Breakfast is okay, but dinner is where the restaurant shines. And then, take heaps of photos so I can drool over them from a far. What a great dinner. A big thanks to Jess who finally convinced me to go! Thanks for a great night, guys.
~LTG! *************************************************************** Urban Bistro 160 Fullarton Road Rose Park, SA 5067 +61 8331 2400 www.urbanbistro.com.au
