Chesser Cellar
29 Chesser St, city
Phone: 08 8223 3791
Email: chesser@senet.com.au
Chesser Cellar: Lunch, Monday-Friday. The bar is open after 5pm Monday-Friday (until late on Fridays).
Cafe Chessers: Breakfast and lunch Monday-Friday, from 8am.
Four function rooms available,14 to 110 people, for morning, noon or night, seven days a week, catering and beverage package options.
Review / John McGrath

IT is very difficult to imagine Chesser Cellar without the suited Superman of smooth, Primo Caon, at the controls. I have visions of the young Primo growing up on the premises, sleeping in a laundry drawer at night, practising magnanimous gestures, handshaking and the feather-light “guiding shoulder touch” wearing a tiny but always perfect dark suit and a restrained tie. By about the time of his Confirmation, Primo would have mastered all the advanced arts of restaurant, cafe and wine bar management. Thorny tasks like talking civilly to “Drink Reps” and Council Mandarins, giving staff pep talks, and subtleties like serving the best bread in Adelaide at the correct temperature would be mere bagatelles.

As pleasing as these childhood scenes are for me to invent, regrettably they are wrong. Primo broke it to me that he qualified as a master butcher and worked at Mases Meats in Rundle St. Oh well, a least you’ve got a trade to fall back on, Primo.
For those of you who haven’t yet walked down Chesser St and into the arms of Primo Caon in the resolutely clubbable wine bar and restaurant, or slipped into the slick cafe alongside for a quick lunch and a decent glass of wine; please do. The place is both a treat and a tradition. Be warned however; one visit could turn you into a recidivist.

I don’t know how the place (and Primo) have avoided getting some sort of South Australian Heritage Award or been named an “Icon” or something. If a punt kick and an amphibian cake that exists the world over can be worshiped, why not Chesser Cellar?

The casual cafe side serves great value dishes such, as a risotto of roasted chicken, baby spinach, spring onions and shaved parmesan for $9.50. Quite an irony for Primo, who comes originally from the Venice end of Italy, who had to adapt to providing sound but exceedingly traditional English food, corned beef, pork pies and the like, to Chesser’s long-term clientele, then watch as the once forbidden food from his neck of the woods zoomed to stardom.

The cafe, of course, sells good coffee and cakes (fresh berry tarts and cream, $2.50) and many wines by the glass.
In the plush, sequestered atmosphere of the restaurant and wine bar, the buffet has reigned supreme for decades. A very reasonable $19.90 gives you browsing rights over a wide mixture of hot and cold dishes and a dazzling array of condiments. I am sure that many regulars have never looked for an a la carte menu.

But there is one, and from there my companion, an Adelaide Society Figure, chose grilled flathead fillet with Oriental wilted greens and citrus beurre blanc for $19.50. I was unable to pass up the steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli ($18.90). When in Rome...

The pie was deftly finessed by the waitress, de-crusted and decanted into a bowl. Silver-served pie? A first for me.
On the recommendation of the management (P. Caon) we tried a bottle of 2003 Gomersal Shiraz from the Barossa. By a miraculous coincidence I had tried this seldom-seen wine at the Balaklava Cup and loved it. At first sniff the Shiraz seems quite a dainty individual with the subtle fragrances of a bowl of plums and a bunch of violets. It muscles up in the mouth, however, and balances up around an incredible alcohol content of 15.5 per cent. A snip at $27.50. I haven’t seen it in bottle shops; you could call Gomersal Wines (08 8563 3611). I have.

I may have given the impression that Primo is little more than a slick show-pony, but he isn’t and his wine knowledge is encyclopaedic. It is easier to put your faith in his expertise than poring over the large wine list yourself.

Primo Caon is in the game because he genuinely loves it, and it shows. Every day brings him different customers to fuss over, new wines to assess, buy and sell, two dissimilar menus to fret over, and a rabbit warren of rooms to service, upstairs and in the cellar. A sharp contrast to the straitjacketed regime of the booming franchised restaurant, sorry, “food outlet” business where the manual is written in Atlanta, the percentages are done in Sydney and the “product” is forever “consistent”. They’re in plague proportions already, and many more are on the way.

Chesser Cellar is an Adelaide treasure. The meals are just right and the choice of wines by the bottle and glass is excellent. From the outside, Chesser Cellars probably suffers because it looks a little too prim and venerable, i.e. expensive. As you can see from the prices above, the whole experience is quite painless. Say hello to Primo for me.