Red Ochre

Red Ochre on Urbanspoon

This is my favourite of Adelaide's Native Australian restaurants.

Duo of lamb
7/10

Slow cooked lamb shoulder & grilled cutlet with celeriac cream, roasted baby vegetables, rivermint gel & native currant jus.

The slow-cooked lamb shoulder has a very strange texture. Not only is it slow-cooked, the slow-cooked meat has been pulled apart, and reassembled into a brick. It doesn't quite feel like meat any more. It contains hard fragments, which I originally believe are bone, but later discover are oversized pieces of pepper. There's nothing to really flavour this piece of meat. No sauce or gravy. I end up just mixing it with the celeriac purée.

The meat of the cutlets is nicely cooked, but the little black things adorning it turn out to be pomegranate seeds. That might be a nice flavour, but hard and unchewable pomegranate seeds do not enhance my feeding experience.

The waiter tells me it was native currants, not pomegranate.

Davidson Plum & Sunrise Lime Trifle
8/10

With rosella flower jelly, vanilla custard and fresh berries.

This is probably the best trifle I've had. There's a kind of spectrum of tastes and textures that all blend together. I'm never quite sure what I'm eating. There's a lot if fruit in here. The berries at the top are sweet, and at the bottom of the glass, there's a kind of citrus marmalade. It's often hard to tell one fruit from another, or even from the fairly solid jelly, but it all tastes good, and goes nicely with the vanilla custard.

My only criticism of this dessert is that it's too big. :)

:)
View over the Torrens