Red Door Bakery is well known for mouth-watering baked goods, so a visit to the Adelaide store for the second instalment of our city pastry guide was the catalyst for a healthy dose of salivation.

Opening in July of this year, Red Door Bakery’s Grenfell Street shopfront is the third for owners Gareth and Emma Grierson.

After establishing the Parisian-inspired bakery six years ago in Croydon, custom building a kitchen in Ridleyton, and opening a second shop in Goodwood, the couple says that the city store was more a necessity than a desire.

“When we started the business,” Emma says, “we planned to have more than one shop, but it happened a lot quicker than we expected.”

And boy are we glad.

The airy Grenfell Street bakery is an inner city sanctuary in one of the busiest parts of town. With open windows that filter in bucket-loads of natural light, it is a comfortable spot and the perfect place to people watch from a surprisingly well-cushioned seat.

It sounds good already, and I haven’t even started on the food.

Trays upon trays of generously sized pies, pasties and other very good looking pastries line the counter, begging you to renounce your vegetarianism, forget your lactose issues, and break that diet you swore you’d start on Monday. There’s nothing more likely than this line up to make you forget your gluten intolerance for one afternoon. The Muscleman Pie must be eaten!

Personally, I forfeited my poor attempt at “healthy summer body eating” for a chicken & pancetta pie. I regret nothing.

Encased in a buttery, golden exterior, the flavoursome meat was appreciated both by my tastebuds and my empty, growling stomach. Eating this thing was on par with the enjoyment I feel eating half a block of chocolate, minus the shame and regret parts. The soft pastry flakes resting peacefully on my chest 30 minutes after my pie was long devoured actually served as a badge of honour, nay, pride.

Yes, I ate a pie today. You should be jealous.

And knowing that all of the meat used at Red Door Bakery is born and bred in South Australia tops the experience off.

“We buy our meat direct from the farmer at Wakefield Grange and they have an abattoir on the site, so that relieves some of the stress of the animals – no travelling,” says Emma.

Red Door Bakery’s ethos is quality locality, and you can actually taste it in the food.

“The lamb is from Clare Valley, and the pork is Free Range Berkshire Pork. It’s all very local.”

Of their most successful pastries, Emma says the pork and sage sausage rolls are most popular, closely followed by the more traditional beef pie. But that’s only touching on the savoury.

With salted caramel bricks and crème brûlées walking off the shelves, their dessert section is alive and thriving – so much so that Emma’s family jokes the crème brûlées alone will put her children through school.

But Gareth and Emma aren’t hanging about celebrating a job well done –  instead they tell us that a new Red Door Bakery-related business is on the cards.

Emma’s lips were firmly sealed on the details of this new venture, but something in her clue makes me think perhaps it’ll feature in a later edition of our city pastry guide: “We know our dough,” she says.