I love the smell of carcinogens in the morning: the smoke rising as the grey of the charcoal begins to glint with red; the pink, viscous flesh, brief host to flies while it awaits its incineration; those plastic ranks of sauce bottles all gummy at the nozzle.

It wasn’t quite like this in Gouger Street, Adelaide, that Saturday in March. What we had here was more serious than your usual barbie: here the local tradition of blackening slabs of dead animal in the open air was to be fused with more foreign, more European, traditions of alfresco conviviality. The street was closed to motor traffic and some of Adelaide’s best restaurants had set up street stalls with charcoal grills, woks, cast-iron pots. The customers lined up with their paper plates and plastic cutlery and returned to eat whatever they’d bought at long tables: common tables, that was the point, sites (it was hoped) of informal and spontaneous conviviality; none of your anomic Protestant individualism here. People seemed to be having fun. A few days later I heard someone refer, without apparent irony, to ‘the spirit of Gouger Street’; but that was only after we’d left town for the Adelaide foothills and the Symposium of Australian Gastronomy.