Grandma's cooking at Esmay, Adelaide

I've never been a huge fan of flowers in cooking. My mum is an objectively excellent cook but she made one dish when I was growing up that I refused to eat: a tuna casserole flavoured, inexplicably, with lavender. Poison via pot pourri. Rose flavour, too, can easily tip into 'grandma's toilet freshener', unless applied by a very careful and ideally Turkish, Middle Eastern or Yunnanese hand. So of course when I see roses on the menu at Alanna Sapwell-Stone's new Adelaide restaurant, Esmay, I'm ordering them. I'm obtuse like that.

In this case, the pale pink rose petals are layered onto a puddle of house-made jersey curd, fresh peach chunks and green almonds. The cool dairy feels as summery as a soft serve at the beach, the young almonds have a springy freshness that makes you wonder why we ever let them age into woodiness. And the rose gives only the faintest florality. It's very clever and it's very Sapwell-Stone.

For those unfamiliar, Sapwell-Stone is somewhat of an Australian hospitality legend. A founding head chef at Sydney's Saint Peter, she went on to light the stoves at the Eltham Hotel in NSW's Northern Rivers, co-owned with her husband Matt Stone, where she created food that had a sort of British wartime vibe to it (pig's head sausage and Yorkshire pud), cranked up with muscular native flavours (Davidson plum on the profiteroles, saltbush on the flatbread). It was food that felt deeply, genuinely Australian and secured the culinary couple a baked-in following. 

That following will now need to quite literally follow them to Adelaide, where the pair has settled.[[Matt has started a winemaking venture in the Adelaide Hills but still retains the couple's equally modern ocker (mod-ock?) restaurants You Beauty and Ciao, Mate! in northern NSW's Bangalow, as well as the upcoming renovation of the Bellingen Golf Club.]] Alanna was lured by Chris Horner and Steve Blanco of the Blanco Horner hospitality group – which also runs Adelaide's singular Restaurant Botanic – to launch Esmay.