First Look at the Barossa Valley’s Hottest New Restaurant, Staġuni
A new Barossa Valley restaurant built on the art of relationships is all thanks to a chance meeting.
For at least six years, chef Clare Falzon would drive past the historic but run-down Marananga School in the Barossa Valley on their way to work at Hentley Farm. “I remember thinking, ‘That would make such a great restaurant.’”
In late 2023, Falzon was about to board a flight to London when a friend pointed out some fellow passengers. It just so happened they were the same people who had recently bought the school and were planning to turn it into a hospitality and arts precinct. “I really wanted to talk to them but we’d just been on a long flight and I thought that would be annoying,” says the chef with a laugh. “It turned out they were thinking the same thing.”
The parties eventually met properly and the beginnings of Staġuni were born. The restaurant, which retains much of the old school’s charm, draws on the sort of food that Falzon grew up eating on NSW’s Central Coast. With a Maltese father, everything was made from scratch, mainly peasant-style dishes like rabbit stew. The menu, written on a 1952 blackboard, also incorporates lessons they learned from cooking all over the world, including at Bussia, a little artisanal Italian eatery in Amsterdam. “It’s about the sense of place you can create when you keep things small.”
Staġuni’s sense of place is grounded in the ebb and flow of the local, seasonal produce, through dishes like leek Niçoise with salted lemon and olives and a terrine made with chicken from nearby Abelsway Farm. The wine list narrows down the enormous range of bottles available in the Barossa to mostly small producers who have become friends with the chef over the years. Connections are at the heart of it all.
Falzon hopes that their guests leave with a sense of having been somewhere special. “Life is about little moments. My goal is to create a space to make memories every day.”
