10 New Adelaide Restaurants, Bars and Cafes We Got Excited About in Autumn 2026

It’s been a blockbuster year. In summer, SA welcomed nine new hotspots, but things didn’t slow down in autumn. We saw new cafes, day-to-night venues, a hotpot hotspot and spice-driven eateries join the fray.

Here – in alphabetical order – are 10 new Adelaide openings we covered in the last three months.

Aptos, Stirling

Aptos is the most significant new opening in South Australia in several years. It’s also one of the most highly anticipated. Justin James stepped down as executive chef at Adelaide fine diner Restaurant Botanic in April 2024; construction on Aptos got underway in October 2024. Head chef Pierre Verret was appointed in February 2025. In June 2025, James announced he was adding two new bars to the project. But converting a church into a restaurant isn’t easy and after delays and close to 18 months of keeping the faith, Restaurant Aptos opened in May 2026.

The fit-out from the Aptos team and architects Williams Burton Leopardi includes 30 Australian artworks and artisanal ceramics, mostly by Andrei Davidoff. While impressive, Aptos’s true power rests in the kitchen. James – whose CV includes four years at Eleven Madison Park plus stints as executive chef at Melbourne’s Vue de Monde and Adelaide’s Restaurant Botanic – has assembled an Avengers-esque team of seven top chefs from international kitchens, including head chef Verret, a French Canadian who was James’s sous-chef at Vue de Monde then at the Michelin-starred Lurra.

Although the staff is made up of professionals from across the globe, “this is an Australian restaurant,” James says. His passion for native ingredients outpaces most Aussie-born chefs. Aptos’s chefs plate up proteins like emu, crocodile and kangaroo, along with introduced species like camel and water buffalo, and make use of lemon myrtle, cinnamon myrtle, finger and dessert limes, muntries and lilly pilly.

The church turned gallery turned restaurant serves 16 courses for just 14 diners at a time; the diners move through several spaces during the meal. It’s a place where chefs come by way of Detroit, Quebec, Copenhagen, New York, Peru, Bangkok, Kyoto and Melbourne to turn Australian ingredients into meals and memories. It’s special. And, in a world where diners are increasingly cynical about degustation and experiential dining, it gives us all something to believe in.

Around the Corner, Nailsworth

Customs, coffee and community. Those are the three Cs that define Around the Corner, Nailsworth’s new hole-in-the-wall cafe opened by husband-and-wife duo Ahmed Azimi and Suem Valiyff on May 17.

Azimi was born in Afghanistan and grew up in Kabul, where neighbourhood bakeries were at the heart of the community. Valiyff is Australian-born with Tatar roots (a Turkic-speaking group primarily from Eastern Europe and Asia) and has worked in hospitality on and off since she was 15. Both have long wanted to open a cafe that could become the heart of a local area.

The bulk of the menu is twists on classic toasties with Afghan ingredients. The kofta toastie is a crowd-pleaser. The chicken toastie is accented by a green chutney (made by Azimi’s mum) of coriander, garlic and yoghurt. Sweets like fig and walnut brownies, orange and almond cake, and sesame biscuits come courtesy of Shirni by Parwana, the baked goods arm of the beloved Afghan restaurant. The pair also serve honey cake, a dish that is hugely nostalgic for Valiyff, as her mum would make Tatarstan bal tort on special occasions.

Jam House, Nuriootpa

The Barossa is the nation’s oldest wine region and it has a reputation to match. It’s known for established wine labels, traditional styles and big, bold wines. But Jam House is changing things up. It’s run by four next-generation winemakers: Scott Rogasch and Justin Westhoff of Forage Supply Co, Geyer Wine Co’s David Geyer, and White Gate Wine Co’s Chad Connolly. The three wine labels are all known for their fresh, minimal-intervention drops. Jam House joins similar concepts like Bottle Shock in the Adelaide Hills and Under the Sun Collective in Aldinga. It’s part of a growing trend where brands that would otherwise be competitors share facilities and a sales floor.

The venue’s name is borrowed from a century-old cottage on the winemakers’ Nuriootpa property. In the ’80s and ’90s, local musicians used that cottage to gather for jam sessions. Now it’s where the winemakers welcome visitors to taste pours from the three labels, as well as gins from partner Laneway Beverage Co. Soon they’ll host winery tours where you can sample from barrels and learn how these smaller-batch wines are made. Quarterly live music events are also in the pipeline, as well as sporadic pop-up food takeovers.

Little Ladle, West Lakes

When you think of hotpot, you probably picture a DIY experience with a pot of simmering broth that you add raw ingredients to yourself. Yes, that’s hotpot – but it’s not what you’ll find at West Lakes’ new joint, Little Ladle.

Its solution is closer to the Sichuan street food-style malatang. Each bowl is fully customisable: pick your toppings from a wall of produce like in a supermarket, then choose your soup base or dry stir-fry. Once you’ve chosen and paid (it’s $4.50 per 100 grams, regardless of ingredients), take a seat and they’ll bring it out, steaming hot, within minutes. There’s also a free condiments station, which you’re welcome to head to as often as you like for top-ups, plus a fridge of free icy poles for dessert.

Pantry on Prospect, Prospect

Pantry on Prospect (or “Pop” as it’s affectionately known) doesn’t fit into a box. The new project from Masterchef alum Callum Hann and Themis Chryssidis, his business partner at Roma and Olive, opened in April.

It shifts from coffee and quick bites in the early AM, to long lunches that stretch into the evening. All the while, it welcomes shoppers looking to stock up on some of South Australia’s best from the packed pantry. The shelves are lined with more than 200 products including bread from Emma Shearer’s The Lost Loaf in Bowden, pantry items from makers like Little Tin Co, and a selection of cookbooks including local tomes from Parwana, Africola and Provecho from La Popular Taqueria.

The menu spans snacks, larger plates and desserts, with early standouts including a Spencer Gulf king prawn sando with dill tartare; La Vera ricotta gnocchi with Alexandrina Jersey cream; and Barossa Artisan haloumi topped with Woodside honey and fresh juicy figs.

Picoso Mexican Bar y Cocina, Prospect

There’s no denying chef Oliver Luxton’s bona fides. He has cooked in some serious kitchens: Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in London, Pescatore in Christchurch, The Charles Grand and the short-lived but much-loved Raja in Sydney. Most recently he worked as head chef at Adelaide’s Restaurant Botanic under executive chef Jamie Musgrave.

Now he’s making tacos, tlayudas and tostadas at Picoso Mexican Bar y Cocina. Picoso, which means “spicy” in Spanish, sits confidently between casual cantina and refined diner, bringing its own heat and personality to the neighbourhood.

The menu is full of carefully crafted and layered dishes. It moves through small plates – citrus-cured ceviche blanco, SA prawns in aguachile verde, smoked cod roe with chicharron, charred elote with chipotle mayo – into tacos and larger dishes. Mains include smoky whole-roasted prawns, carne asada ranchera off the open-flame grill, and a mushroom Oaxaca tlayuda, which reinterprets the traditional crisp flatbread. Soft house-made corn tortillas come with every main dish, turning the table into its own taco spread with crisp slaw, pickled veg and punchy salsas to stack as desired.

Rocc Up Pizza, Adelaide

Rocc Up Pizza is a one-man pizzeria from Glasgow-born, ex-Coriole chef Jamie Bennie. It opens just three nights a week with an electric Gozney pizza oven that runs on elements for efficient and consistent cooking.

Using the knowledge and techniques from his fine-dining days, Bennie says Rocc Up Pizza has a heavy focus on “post-baked toppings” – that is, toppings that go on after the pizza emerges from the oven. For example, instead of a traditional Hawaiian pizza, he’ll pull a pizza from the oven and top it with a fresh pineapple salsa; a mushroom pizza with a house-made “mushroom crisp”; and a pork and fennel sausage pizza with hot honey, cheese and chives.

At the moment, Bennie offers pizzas by the slice on weekends, which you can eat perched on milk crates out front, or as full 18-inch pizzas to take home.

Shadow Baking, North Adelaide

They say it’s hard to pick a favourite child, but Shadow Baking co-owner Tom Mitchell has no problem declaring Australia’s fourth Shadow Baking store, in North Adelaide’s new Eighty Eight O’Connell development, the prettiest of his stable, thanks largely to its Wes Anderson-inspired Vie Studio fit-out.

Mitchell opened the bakery in 2023 in Sydney alongside fellow Messina chefs Florian Fritsch and Remi Talbot. Shadow Baking expanded to SA in April 2025 with a store in Glenelg. The new North Adelaide store offers dine-in breakfast including sausage-and-egg breakfast buns, and chorizo and eggs served with whipped labneh, pickles and house-made focaccia.

Sodewa Saké Bar, Adelaide

While izakayas, robata grills and omakase restaurants have made their mark on the Australian dining scene, koryori-ya are a rare gem. For the uninitiated, koryori-ya are intimate restaurants that are considered more refined than an izakaya, but less formal than a ryotei, or traditional Japanese restaurant.

Enter Sodewa Saké Bar, which is possibly Adelaide’s first true koryori-ya. Located on Pirie Street (in the former In Studio & Cafe space), it’s run by Hiro Sodeyama and Ri Ogawa, from Yamanashi and Fukuoka respectively.

Ogawa is a trained saké sommelier who will rotate saké depending on the season. Sodeyama looks after the kitchen. Dishes are designed to be paired with saké, but are just as enjoyable on their own. Specials might include short-aged, grilled tommy ruff with house-made radish fish stock; squid with shichimi and yuzu mayonnaise; or Wagyu beef tataki. The permanent menu includes scallops from Hokkaido with French onion, flying fish roe, chives and ponzu mayo, and slow-braised Adelaide Plains pork belly with leek, chilli and sansho, a spice made by grinding the berries of the Japanese prickly ash tree. There’s also a “raw bar” serving salmon, kingfish and tuna sashimi, as well as three “fish of the day” sashimi serves.

Tread Lightly, Willunga

Since the 1860s, the charming slate building at 29 High Street, Willunga, has been a butchery, tailor shop, newsagency, dress shop, art gallery and now Tread Lightly. Tread Lightly is a cosy restaurant and wine bar owned by Will and Trina Kay-McPhail. Opening Tread Lightly has been a long time coming for the pair. They moved in as partial tenants (“we didn’t have the cellar”) in 2024, before going through the “nightmare” process of council permissions for upgrades.

Then, news the building was up for sale changed everything. “We were at the pub mourning our presumed loss, when all of a sudden we got a call saying congratulations, we had the winning bid,” says Will. “It was incredibly emotional.”

Heading up the kitchen is Georg Delago (ex-Coriole, Press, The Botanic Lodge), whose menu heroes locally grown vegetables, with some meat dishes focused on wild and invasive species. “We use what we might have once called waste products,” says Will. “For example, we’ve got a confit rabbit leg dish [and] a house-made black pudding that uses leftover blood from the local butcher.”

Additional reporting by Stacey Caruso, Claudia Dichiera, Emily Taliangis, Angelica-Hazel Toutounji and Nicole Wedding.