Sunday, 18th January 2009
Dining At Penfolds Magill Estate
Fi and I set ourselves a “challenge” a few months ago after we had decided that we were going to return to the UK permenantly and that was to dine at as many of South Australia’s fine restaurants as we could. Isn’t life difficult?
Penfolds Magill Estate is (as of the time of writing, January 2009) rated as the sixth best restaurant in Adelaide by Gourmet Traveller (we’ve also eaten at the second, fourth and tenth place restaurants) and we had been looking forwards to eating there for some time (it’s quite hard to get a booking). What was even more exciting was the fact that we were going with Anit and Bec who are probably our closest friends out here in Australia.
Anit picked us up at 18:00 and drove us to Bec’s place (which is only about five minutes from the restaurant) where he proceeded to get ready. For some reason, whenever I go to Bec’s place I end up causing some degree of carnage. Last time I spilt wine over the wooden floors (white wine mercifully) whereas this time I somehow managed to break the corkscrew (not because of my sheer strength either I’m sorry to say). Anyway, we had a chat and enjoyed a glass of Two Hand moscato which (to quote Fi) was nice and “spritzy”.
We had reservations at the restaurant for 19:30 and so we called a taxi. As is customary here in Adelaide, the taxi driver had no idea where his destination was nor did he have any form of GPS system or even a paper map. Honestly, how do these people earn a living?! Fortunately, Bec knew how to get there and gave him directions.
The restaurant is in a beautiful setting. It’s perched just above Adelaide in one of the suburbs and is surrounded by vines. The dining room itself has a large glass window that overlooks the vines with the city lights in the background. It was idyllic.
We had decided in advance that we were going to have the degustation menu and decided when we got there that we’d go for the wine package but not the “premium” wine package. The difference? Well, our meal and wine was $190 per person and the premium package was an extra $80 each. I don’t know about you but my palate is not that sensitive! We started with a glass of (really good) Pimms as an apéritif. One thing I have found really annoying about degustation menus (certainly here in Australia, I don’t know if it’s the same back home) is that if you order an apéritif, the waiter/waitress will often bring out your first glass of wine before you’ve finished the aperitif and you just end up guzzling it down (which is what happened last night) – only a slight grumble.
I can’t remember the exact dishes but they were all very nice. The only one I had some reservations about was the tomato bubbles with caviar – very odd but tasty nonetheless. There was an option to upgrade to a glass of the Penfolds Grange halfway through the meal for $25 each which we decided to go for to see what all the fuss was about. That decision ended up causing a little bit of a problem at the end of the evening as (apparently) because we didn’t go for the “premium” wine package, it was $50 per person to upgrade to a glass of the Grange instead of $25. The waiter at the time didn’t tell us this and so I (politely) said that we thought there’d been a mistake on the bill. That didn’t go down too well and the (I think) head waiter who handled the bill was downright rude. We ended up “only” paying $25 per person but it did spoil (not ruin) the evening a bit.
My favourite bit of the meal was the cheese platter. Another ninja (all of the waiting staff were dressed in black and looked, to me at least, like ninjas) came out with a cheese trolley. He must have spent ten minutes describing the cheeses and it was very civilised and, most importantly, very tasty.
The chocolate desert course was divine and was followed by tasty truffles and coffee. The whole bill came to about $900 (ouch!) which was actually more than all the food and wine consumed by us and 16 other people at Good Life the evening before. You know what though – it was worth every cent as Fi and I had a fabulous time with two of our best friends.
Something else I should mention – it turns out that Bec and Anit are coming to the UK in August / September this year for a six-week holiday! They’re not going to spend the entire time in the UK (or indeed with us) but it will be wonderful to see them again.