A Guide to Adelaide

After the bustle of Sydney and Melbourne, Adelaide, Australia's fifth-largest city and the capital of the state of South Australia, comes as a gentle surprise. This green, well-mannered place, with an architectural mix ranging from the colonial Victorian and Edwardian buildings around Victoria Square to fanciful art deco skyscrapers and more recent glass-faced high-rises, is a pleasure to explore on foot and has a variety of excellent museums, a thriving cultural life and a lively restaurant and café scene.

While exiled convicts originally populated major Australian cities such as Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Hobart, free British settled Adelaide after South Australia was founded in 1836. Inspired by the design of the city of Catania on Sicily, Col. William Light laid out Adelaide in a neat street grid, including its many parks and the neatly landscaped greenbelt of parkland and nature reserves that surrounds the city center.    

The best place to begin a visit to Adelaide is at the pair of museums on North Terrace downtown. The Art Gallery of South Australia has an impressive collection of Australian art, along with 20 Rodin statues, while the nearby South Australian Museum features an intriguing aboriginal cultures gallery and special exhibits on whales and Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson. Adelaide's newest attraction is the National Wine Centre of Australia, which occupies a striking modern building adjacent to the delightful Botanic Gardens and offers exhibits on local winemaking in the Barossa Valley, Adelaide Hills and other regions, as well as wine tastings. Anyone interested in wine might also enjoy visiting Penfolds' Magill Estate, a short drive from downtown Adelaide and the location of the original Penfolds vineyards. This estate is where Penfolds creates its celebrated Grange wines, judged by wine writer Robert Parker to have "replaced Bordeaux's Pétrus as the world's most exotic and concentrated wine." The estate offers tours and tastings.    

No visit to Adelaide would be complete without a trip to the lively Central Market, a large covered food market that displays the rich agricultural bounty of South Australia and also show-cases the ethnic diversity of a city where 22 percent of the population is foreign-born.  

Further proof that Adelaidians are avid gourmets and oenophiles is offered by the city's large choice of excellent restaurants and wine bars. Start an evening at the popular Universal Wine Bar (285 Rundle Street, Tel. 8232-5000), which serves local Coffin Bay oysters on the half-shell, along with a variety of first-rate local wines by the glass. Adelaide's best-known restaurant is The Manse (142 Tynte Street, North Adelaide, Tel. 8267-4636. Dinner for two, $200), a beautiful old Victorian mansion where a talented young team in the kitchen creates terrific contemporary Australian dishes such as foie gras rolled in cornflakes with Muscatel jelly, and pink snapper with tomatoes, leeks and Comte cheese foam.

In town, the sleek new Celsius restaurant (95-97 Gouger Street, Tel. 8231-6023. Dinner for two, $180) is getting rave reviews for the inventive market-menu cooking of young chef Ayhan Erkoc and his passionate team, including his brother, who drives an hour daily to the family's small organic vegetable farm to collect the restaurant's produce. The coolly elegant dining room is a pleasant setting for dishes such as scallops grilled in their shells with a delicious garnish of sweet corn and crumbled bacon, and roasted duck in a delicate bouillon with chopped fresh pea shoots, baby radishes, fava beans and coin-shaped pieces of zucchini. Service at Celsius restaurant is charming, and there's a first-rate wine list, too.