Peter Rabbi Cafe and Bar opens on Hindley
Hindley Street has gained a colourful new addition with shipping container bar slash inner-city backyard Peter Rabbit.
Part of the newly blooming reinvention of Hindley Street’s student-heavy Western reaches, the site has been home to an intriguing overhaul over the past few months. Like Pink Moon Saloon‘s transformation of a narrow Leigh Street laneway into a facsimile mountain hut, Peter Rabbit is an inventive use of previously discarded real estate.
This sliver of land next door to a power station seemed resigned to its fate as a disused patch of concrete and a mural until Peter Rabbit’s trio of James McIntyre, Dan Morton and Jack Nelligan spied the property’s potential and convinced land owners SA Power Networks to take a punt.
“Initially when we saw the location we started out with a pretty basic plan,” Nelligan says, “kind of just setting up a small shed, having some roll out glass, selling coffee a little bit of food and alcohol. It kind of expanded from there.
“Dan had just been to Christcurch in New Zealand,” he explains. “When they had the earthquake all these shipping containers popped up for all the cafes and retail stores, a really really cheap way of creating a semi-permanent structure, so that’s where the shipping container came from and the space just grew around that. We were keen to put out some lawn, and an outdoor garden, especially down that end where there’s really not a lot of grass to go sit on, it’s all bricks and concrete buildings. So for us that was a really big thing,” he says.
With the re-purposed shipping container forming the backbone of the site, the open, airy and emphatically green new premises has all the makings of a quaintly colourful garden, with green lawns, a sunny verandah and abundant potted plantlife. It all suits the venue’s gustatory offerings to a tee.
“It’s inspired a little bit from my heritage, my mum is has a Croation background so a lot of the food is take from an Eastern European origin with a little bit of the Middle East in there, a fusion of those two flavours,” Nelligan says. A fetching assortment of pastries sit alongside a range of salads bursting with fresh greens.
“We really wanted to create something that was accessible to uni students and shiftworkers, food you can grab on the run.” Later in the day the venue’s bar side comes to the fore with a range of beer, wine and cocktail options from Big Shed Brewery and Main & Cherry wines. “It’s a pretty small wine and beer list but we wanted to get some smaller producers, keep it small and SA based.”
But our favourite thing has to be the live-in bunnies that take the Peter Rabbit theme to literal extremes rarely broached by Adelaide bars. Just look at ’em. Their names are Flopsy and Mopsy. You love them, don’t you.
“They’re a permanent fixture,” Nelligan says. “We built them a little rabbit coop and a pen, we reckon they’ll get plenty of love.”
We agree.
Peter Rabbit is open from Tuesday, November 24
WHERE
Corner of Hindley and Liverpool Street
OPENING HOURS
Monday – Thursday: 7.30am – 3.30pm
Friday: 7.30am – 10.00pm
Sunday: 12.00am – 10.00pm
