New centrepiece Adelaide Festival Centre restaurant revealed with controversial literary twist
Angry Penguin will be the dining centrepiece of Adelaide Festival Centre’s $35 million upgrade, paying tribute to one of Adelaide’s great literary pot-stirrers.
Adelaide’s reputation as a festival city was decades away when, in February 1941, a 19-year-old university student named Max Harris launched a new literary magazine dubbed Angry Penguins.
“The production of this magazine will appear then an act of defiance, and indeed it is, but defiance is a dish to be eaten cold,” read the opening editorial, which took aim at the university’s “indifference” following the death of an earlier student rag.
It was the beginning of a literary legacy that would make Harris a divisive boy wonder of Australian literature, and Angry Penguins a hotbed for modernist expression and iconoclasm whose pages would feature luminaries such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester.
It remains to be seen whether acts of defiance, hot or cold, will be on the menu when a new restaurant inspired by Harris opens next year as part of the Adelaide Festival Centre’s $35 million upgrade. It will replace the venue’s current dining spot, The Star.
Adelaide Festival Centre CEO Kate Gould says the new restaurant, Angry Penguin, will mark “a new and exciting era of dining” for Adelaide’s performing arts heartland, with a kitchen headed by Executive Chef Alex Katsman, formerly of the Marriott Hotel Adelaide, Sofitel Adelaide, and the Henry Jones Art Hotel.
“With Alex Katsman crafting the menu, and Studio Nine’s design team working together with South Australian furniture artisans Andrew Carvolth and Jon Goulder to create a restaurant that celebrates the history of Adelaide Festival Centre and the creative legacy of Max Harris and the Angry Penguins,” Gould said in a statement.
“Open for lunch and dinner, we hope that Angry Penguin will become a special dining destination for all to experience.”
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The Festival Centre has released an early rendition of the new space’s mid-century inspired fit-out, which includes a few extra Easter eggs from the ghosts of Adelaide’s cultural past (CityMag can’t help but notice the mock-up appears to feature artworks by Otto Hajek, whose colourful concrete sculptures once dominated the Festival Centre plaza before their removal to make way for the Festival Tower redevelopment).
It’s a remarkable turnaround for Harris and the magazine’s fortunes. In 1944, just a few years after that debut issue, Harris was tried and fined £5 by an Adelaide court for publishing “indecent” material, after he and the magazine became snared in one of Australia’s most infamous literary hoaxes.
The 1944 legal saga frequently descended into farce, as Harris was asked to explain the meaning of several surrealist poems published in Angry Penguins and attributed to the late ‘Ern Malley’. Both Malley and his oeuvre were entirely made up – part of an elaborate prank by two rival poets who sought to discredit Harris and his modernist ideals.
"If you look at the modernist movement, Angry Penguins was an extraordinary catalyst that got modernism up and running in Australia."
Harris died in 1995, but his daughter Samela was involved early in the restaurant’s naming process. A veteran journalist and theatre critic herself, Harris is thrilled by the “extraordinary revival” of her father’s work (Angry Penguin will be the second Adelaide establishment to draw inspiration from Harris and Angry Penguins, with Stepney wine bar Ern Malley opening in 2023).
“It’s an incredibly perceptive thing to do,” Harris tells CityMag, citing the Festival Centre’s long history with modernist creatives onstage and off. “If you look at the modernist movement, Angry Penguins was an extraordinary catalyst that got modernism up and running in Australia.
“And I think what they’ve done is, culturally, extremely profound in choosing this name, because the modernist movement is having this interesting renaissance.”
The restaurant news marks the latest shake-up for the Festival Centre following the news earlier this month that the long-running Adelaide Guitar Festival would be discontinued as Gould prepares a new strategic direction for the centre.
Harris says her father wasn’t just a tall poppy; Max was also a keen “foodie” whose regular haunts included one Grenfell Street restaurant he frequented so regularly he registered his regular table as a business premises.
Theatregoers, foodies and poets alike can stake out their own table – and start plotting their own acts of defiance – at Angry Penguin from February 2026.
