Images: Supplied.
One of South Australia’s smallest dining rooms has taken out one of the state’s biggest hospitality titles, with the 10-seat Penobscot Restaurant inside the Watervale Hotel kitchen named SA’s best Restaurant in a Pub or Club.
The Clare Valley restaurant claimed the category at the 2026 Restaurant & Catering Hostplus Awards for Excellence, held at the Adelaide Convention Centre on Monday night.
The victory marks the sixth year in a row the Watervale Hotel team has taken out the category, but it was the first time the award was entered under its newer Penobscot Restaurant experience.
Created a little over a year ago, Penobscot Restaurant is a degustation-only dining room located directly inside the Watervale Hotel’s fully operating kitchen.
Just 10 guests sit around the chef’s table, watching as the kitchen team prepares their courses while simultaneously sending the hotel’s à la carte dishes across the pass.
Watervale Hotel co-owner Warrick Duthy said the intimate format gave guests more than a meal, allowing them to build a connection with the chefs throughout the experience.
“When you sit in there, the chefs are preparing your meal in front of your eyes,” Warrick said.
“It’s educational, it’s entertaining and it’s also intimate. You develop a relationship with the chef through the course of the evening.”
The restaurant is closely connected to nearby Penobscot Farm, the organic and biodynamic property operated by Warrick and executive chef Nicola Palmer.
“All the vegetables and produce served in the restaurant are grown by us,” Warrick said.
“All the proteins are sourced from regenerative farms and are grass-fed and free-range. It’s all about the produce.”
Guests can also match the degustation with Clare Valley wines or local gins, while the non-alcoholic option uses farm-grown fruit and herbs to create juices, teas, vinegars, syrups, shrubs, ferments and kombuchas.
Warrick said the mocktail pairing was intended to feel every bit as considered as the restaurant’s wine and gin experiences.
“When people do that option, they’re not going, ‘I’m a second-class citizen.’ They’re going, ‘Wow, this is amazing,’” he said.
The chef’s table also gives diners an unusual view of what is happening throughout the wider hotel.
Warrick said guests often finish their degustation wanting to return the following night for the duck sliders, chips and other dishes they watched being served to the hotel’s à la carte diners.
The opposite also happens, with customers dining elsewhere in the hotel noticing the chef’s table in the kitchen and returning to experience Penobscot Restaurant.
While the two menus offer completely different experiences, Warrick said that contrast was part of what made the concept work.
Penobscot will now represent South Australia at the national Restaurant & Catering Hostplus Awards for Excellence in Sydney on October 26.
The Watervale Hotel previously won the national Restaurant in a Pub or Club title in 2022, and Warrick said the team hoped its newer dining experience could bring the award back to South Australia.
“We’re now focused on, fingers crossed, that we might be able to put South Australia on the map again by winning that award,” he said.
“That’s what we’d really love to see.”
Penobscot Restaurant at the Watervale Hotel
Where: 37 Main North Road, Watervale
When: Degustation sittings at noon and 6pm
For more information, click here.
