Temperance Restaurant at Hotel Renmark is going completely against the grain with a new out-of-the-box event series that challenges expectations of what a typical restaurant can be.
Shifting away from weekly service, the acclaimed Riverland venue has unveiled a curated 2026 dining program built around a series of immersive, limited-run events designed to reimagine how regional dining can be experienced.
The Riverland restaurant has built a strong reputation since opening in 2023, earning recognition from a number of industry bodies including being named South Australia’s Best Regional Restaurant at the 2026 Adelaide Dining Magazine Awards.
Now, the team is launching a bold new approach designed to deepen those connections and create dining experiences that feel more immersive, memorable, and totally distinct from one another.
Rather than operating on a regular weekly schedule, Temperance will now open for a limited number of carefully designed events throughout the year. Each will centre on a distinct theme, whether that’s celebrating seasonal harvests, collaborating with regional producers, or creating shared-table experiences that invite guests to slow down and savour the moment.
Executive Chef Anthony Cresp says the shift comes after a period of reflection and adaptation for the restaurant. “We’ve constantly adapted our service style over the past two years. Stepping away from a weekly offering and moving to essentially a once-a-month event series lets us still offer something high end for locals, but make it achievable.”
The new format will allow the team to return to what Temperance does best: storytelling through food and close collaboration with local producers. “It gives us an opportunity to really dial back to our core, what we were good at at Temperance, which was delivering those unique, local producer-driven stories,” Cresp says. “We can focus hard on that while still giving a great experience to everyone who comes.”
Each event will be entirely bespoke, with menus and concepts developed specially for the ocassion. “They’re all fully bespoke,” he explains. “That’s why it takes a bit of time to release them. I’m still building the menus and the concept for each one.”
Among the 2026 event calendar are two Valentine’s Day dinners across consecutive nights, ‘His’ on Friday and ‘Hers’ on Saturday night. The Friday evening will lean into bolder, smoke-driven and meat-focused dishes, while Saturday will showcase lighter flavours including seafood and white meats. “We wanted to do both nights but make them feel different,” Cresp says. “The idea is couples could come to both and have two very different meals.”
Later in the year, Temperance will also collaborate with Woolshed Brewery for a crossover weekend that sees the team host an event at the restaurant before taking over the brewery as a food truck. The restaurant will also launch a winter Beef and Red Wine series running through August. The winter program will delve into in-house butchery and aged local beef, paired with a rotating lineup of regional wineries each week.
“These will be local producer-driven or season-driven events that let us go back to our basics,” Cresp says. “It’s about focusing on the stories we can tell and doing them well.”
For producers, the new approach offers deeper collaboration and greater visibility. For guests, it provides something increasingly rare: a reason to plan ahead and treat dining as an occasion in itself. Each opening invites diners to engage with the story behind the produce, connect with the people who grow and make it, and experience Temperance at its most expressive.
Temperance Restaurant
Where: Hotel Renmark, 81 Murray Ave, Renmark
When: Find upcoming event dates via the link below
For more info, click here.
