Delight

It’s like walking into a different time, the place is so unfamiliar. Yet familiar, when you look close. The Elephant Walk Cafe, on Adelaide’s Melbourne Street, hits you like a brick and grows on you like a rash. It’s amazing.

I’ve been going there for about ten years now, because it has all the characteristics that your living room might have; if you slept in your living room. It’s warm. The place looks warm and it feels warm. It’s comfortable and it’s very interesting.

The Elephant Walk is themed. Everyone says it smacks of India. But it’s decorated with tacky and beautiful souvenirs and trophies from Thailand, Indonesia, Africa and someone’s lounge room. And the lights are so low, with their red filters of cellophane, you couldn’t care less. You “feel” the Elephant Walk. And somehow it renders all your senses equal.

The guy that dreamed it all up, back in 1987, had a flare for the esoteric. It’s alleged that he took his ballroom dancing partner on a junket around Asia and that’s when he came up with the idea. He brought some exquisite timber elephants home. The next owner, Ian Zibell, ran it for about eleven years and opened the palm garden out the back. The current owners, Mark and Belinda, have resisted changing the place too much. For the palm garden, they designed a table and had a friend make it out of old jarrah sleepers. Mark’s very proud of it and he wanted it photographed. I could see where he was coming from.

The idea of creating something useful and alluring out of the fundamentally useless and mundane has its certain charm. This principle bore the Elephant Walk.

The origin of the name isn’t cut and dried. There’s an Elephant Walk Cafe in Paris. And there’s the movie. But I think it’s named for mysteriousness and captivation, just like Siam itself, and that’s it. The name’s just a motif. An excuse to cram pack elephant statues throughout the place.

That, and it rolls off the tongue too. “Let’s go to the Elephant Walk,” you say after a meal at the tastiest of restaurants. Because it’s worth leaving wherever you are, just to sink into the soft couches and light.

It’s funny, but people laugh when they first come in. You know it’s a cafe, but it could be a bar or a bordello. And the range of people who come to laugh and lounge is wide. With lazy eyes, they lay back and listen. Mark, a musician himself, plays the stuff that people don’t often hear, like U2 song producer Daniel Lanois. The music floods every booth and every booth is the universe. The place is absolutely custom made for couples.

But why talk about a small, bohemian cafe of questionable architectural merit in Architecture Australia? Wondrous coffee and humble food helps, but the Elephant Walk is about ambience. The atmosphere there is as strong as Epsom Salts. It’s a space that was imagined and created out of nothing. It’s a cafe that proves that you don’t need big money to set something up.

To a background of soft Ladysmith Black Membaso I speak to Mark of the obvious eclecticism. “Yes it’s eclectic, but within the framework,” he says. Whatever that framework is, it “feels” good.

Images: Steve Rendoulis.