Top chef leaves Festival Tower dining showpiece
In a blow to Festival Tower’s new dining centrepiece, its top chef has left the kitchen to pursue new ambitions.
Respected industry figure, Adelaide chef Baine Stubbs, has left Festival Tower’s ambitious Station Road restaurant less than 12 months after it opened – to launch his own bar in the East End. In a double blow to the restaurant, his partner who was Station Road’s bar manager, is joining him in the venture.
Stubbs has said the new offering Burdette would be a prohibition-era inspired “social club bar” in the former Gunbae Chicken & Beer site in Union St, and serve up elevated snacks alongside a considered drinks menu and live DJs on weekends.
New Zealand-born Stubbs, who cooked at Melbourne’s Vue de Monde and was head chef at a restaurant based in the Louvre in Paris, Ellsworth, prior to joining Station Road, said he and his partner, Saskia Lopes de Souza, decided it was “a good time to do something for ourselves”. She, too, had been working at Station Road, as the restaurant’s bar manager.
“We live locally, so we had our eyes on that site for ages,” Baine says of the Union St site. “We said, ‘we have got to turn that into a bar’.
“When we saw it up for lease, we jumped on it.”
Food-wise, punters can expect bar snack favourites such as olives, cheese, charcuterie and oysters, right through to “five or six things that are more creative; more restaurant-style”.
“We’re trying to emulate these kind of New York cocktail bars that have a great food offering,” Baine says.
“We want to establish that we’re going to be open in the East End until 2am as per our license, because it’s hard to find something in the East End after 10.30pm. With late-night food, as well.”
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Station Road opened to fanfare in November 2024 on the ground floor of the Walker Corporation’s Festival Tower and recently moved to a more casual bistro-style offering.
Burdette is expected to open by late October. It will seat a total of 80 people inside and out, and be open from noon for coffee and snacks, while Friday and Saturday nights will play host to live DJ entertainment.
