Free Ranging Market Tour -a feast for the senses, 2005-11-24 00:00:00
Review by Susan Kurosawa
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Free Ranging Market Tour -a feast for the senses
THE CURIOUS COOK
Susan Kurosawa
November 19, 2005
IT feels like Marseilles or Naples or Istanbul, or maybe the Vietnamese hill station of Dalat, by way of Kowloon. If ever a food market were truly cosmopolitan, then this is it. In a few hours of touring, I sample French cheeses, Italian coffee, hand-rolled Chinese white tea in peony-like tiny furls, Polish sausage, Barossa Valley olive oil and just-cooked Russian piroshki. There are leafy chlorophyll-green Asian vegetables and sugar-pea and garlic shoots massed so tightly at Lien Heng Grocery that it's hard to distinguish what's what.
And all of this is in Adelaide. The Central Market, in the heart of the city, between Gouger and Grote streets, opened in 1870: a collection of wood and iron sheds lit by gas and crowded with carts filled with the produce of "gardeners from all quarters". In those early days, fresh fruit and veg, fish, game and hay were the drawcards. Three decades later, a two-storey red-brick facade was built facing Grote Street, and iron-and-glass arcades of shops followed. A car park and escalators were added in the 1950s, but the Central Market has resisted (so far) the redevelopment plans that bedevil inner-city precincts. What you see today may not be entirely original but it is satisfyingly old-fashioned.
There are 90 stalls and it's easy to potter about, making sure you weave up and down, north to south or vice versa, ideally ending up at the western flank for the market's best coffee at Lucia's.
But for an in-depth appreciation of what's on offer and the opportunity to talk to stallholders and sample their specialist wares, a tour is the answer. Restaurateur and food lover Mark Gleeson has worked at the market for more than 15 years and recently began taking around small groups. His is an insider's view: he runs Providore (stall 66), a long-established mixed-business stand displaying such tempting wares as dozens of types of South Australian olive oils, deli goods, nut-studded nougat and rocky road muffins.
Gleeson moves at a cracking pace and his 90-minute tour must be treated as reconnaissance: make notes on which stalls are worth a second look.
The market, he says, represents a real link between growers and consumers, with a focus on regional organic produce that can be "traced to the tree". There are free-range eggs from Kangaroo Island, pesticide-free stone fruit and berries from the Adelaide Hills, citrus from the Riverland; at the House of Organics (stalls 34 and 35), Fuji apples from today's crop are cracker-crisp. A sign indicates their family tree, as it were: Brian Mason of Forest Range is the grower.
At Smelly Cheese (stall 44), tastings are in full swing and a Brie de Meaux is causing murmurs of pleasure among potential buyers. "You can taste the forest floor," says the seller. And so we can. There's local cheese, too: buffalo milk bocconcini and sheep's milk haloumi from Kangaroo Island. At Taldy-Kurgan (stall 3), named for the Kazakhstan hometown of owner Alex, teams of white-uniformed women are pounding dough to make piroshki, which will be stuffed with hot savoury fillings, of which a leek and potato mixture is especially delicious. "Piroshki is the hot dog of Russia," Alex grins.
Next door (stall 2), at Zedz Cafe, there are buskers and face-painters around its entrance on the Eastern Roadway concourse and waiters weave to tables with trays of soups and glasses of freshly squeezed juice (blood orange, perhaps, or a mix of apple, mint and pear).
At the marvellously jumbled Sevenhill Fine Foods (stall 75), Polish-born Waldek shows off woody-looking licorice root. His sausage-hung cavern is thick with home-made ginger biscuits, tubs of sauerkraut, creamy pouring yoghurt, traditional cheesecakes and poppyseed pastries, smoked speck and yellow-green pickles.
We taste delicate Chinese cha at T Bar off the Southern Roadway (shop GO44) and admire a collection of fragile teapots patterned with blossoms. Gleeson says no coffee is sold here: what look like lattes being served to customers perched at high tables are actually glasses of milky-sweet Indian chai, frothed on top. Next door (shop GO46-48) is Samtass Seafoods, for big Ceduna oysters in the shell. Marino Meats (shop GO52-54) offers what could be Australia's best prosciutto, cured to a private recipe since the family arrived from Italy two generations ago and hung those first haunches in a backyard shed.
After a few slices of wafer-fine prosciutto, it seems logical to adjourn for a perfect espresso at Lucia's Pizza & Spaghetti Bar, the first pizza place in the city, opened in 1957 with five stools. Lucia's daughters run the business now but the spaghetti sauce is still made according to their mother's recipe and younger family members run Lucia's Fine Foods next door, selling bottled sauces and condiments, truffle oil and sherry vinegar with a taste of "the old country".
And that's how it should be: a mix of old Europe and new Asia, the freshest produce imaginable, plenty of commitment and vim to proceedings at one of Australia's oldest markets.
In a nutshell, it is what we love: edible tourism.
Adelaide Central Market is South Australia's biggest tourist attraction, welcoming 8.5 million visitors in the 2004-05 financial year. The market is open on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Mark Gleeson's tours cost $42. More: www.centralmarkettour.com.au.
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