The Crafers Hotel is a beacon for those who love great food and wine, and a truly great pub that offers a snapshot of what’s hip in the Adelaide Hills.
The Crafers in its current incarnation is the product of tradition, vision and love. When a small syndicate, including members of a prominent pub family and some of the most passionate wine lovers in the state, reinvented the hotel a decade ago, they wanted a pub that could pour a pint and decant first-growth claret with equal ease; a place where burgers and France’s bouillabaisse seafood soup shared the same table. They well and truly succeeded. The Crafers is a true destination pub – the kind of place that visitors plan itineraries around, and the locals love to show off.
Wine sits at the very heart of the Crafers Hotel, figuratively and literally. The hotel’s wine room sits at the centre of the pub, a gleaming cave of treasures, constructed from pale wood and glass. It showcases the vinous landscape of the Adelaide Hills in intricate detail, offering up arguably the best collections of the region’s wines to be found anywhere. From that starting point, it expands in many directions, all dangerously tempting for any wine lover. It goes deep on Australian classics, with a special emphasis on chardonnay and pinot noir, before heading off to plunder the old world. Great Bordeaux with proper bottle age, the great vintages of Champagne, and a Burgundy list that amasses every name you’d want to see from France’s Côte-d’Or.
A quick visit to the wine room will betray a Francophile hand at work, so it should come as no surprise to take a seat in the dining room and be presented with a menu that just about plays the national anthem, ‘La Marseillaise’, when you open it. While you’ll still find the pub classics here – albeit elevated and refined – you’ll also find many of the keystones of French cuisine as well. Shredded confit duck rillettes and cheesy chausson pastries, pan-roasted chicken in a sauce of France’s Calvados brandy, and steak frites come out of the kitchen with rapid regularity, and many tables will be tucking into exceptional South Australian seafood with a super-fresh “fruits de mer” platter.
It’s the versatility of the Crafers Hotel that makes it so special. Fancy a romantic weekend away, drinking some of the finest wines on the planet? You can do that here. Want to take your grandma out to celebrate a milestone birthday? You can do that, too.
A quick pint or a long lunch that turns into dinner are also viable options at this place that has understood how to show visitors a good time for more than 180 years.
