1 week Ago By Matt Shea
How do you create a restaurant that lasts? In a Brisbane food scene often preoccupied with the shiny and the new, it’s this question that preoccupies David Flynn. Flynn and business partners Frank Li, Andrew Hohns and Nick Woodward have a history of taking their time, from their blockbuster Rick Shores in Burleigh Heads to (the now closed) Little Valley in Fortitude Valley and then the heaving Southside in Fish Lane. Flynn is talking in the private dining room of the 80-seat Central, the group’s latest restaurant, which he’s piloting with new partners Benny Lam and Maui Manu (who diners might recognise as executive chef and restaurant manager of Southside respectively).
The Star has a new contender for Brisbane’s best Japanese restaurant Central is located right in the guts of the city, beneath 340 Queen Street – once home to the historic Piccadilly Arcade and Primitif Cafe, a favoured ’50s hangout for Brisbane beatniks. From the moment you walk down the stairs and through its curtained entrance, you see the thought that’s gone into the place: the salt-and-pepper granite bench tops, the illuminated panelled ceiling, the tiered layout with counter seats looking directly down – stadium like – into the kitchen. Designed by in-demand architect and designer Jared Webb of J.
AR OFFICE, there’s absolutely nothing else like it in Brisbane. “We’re creating venues that will last for hopefully 10 years, 15 years, maybe longer,” Flynn says. “To do that, you also need to spend years developing them.
That’s how I guess we think about it. “This is the sixth venue opening of some sort that I’ve been involved in ..
. It’s also human nature as you get older: ‘If I’m going to do something, it’s gotta be the right thing.’” Central’s thing is Hong Kong, the restaurant named after the frenetic heart of that city with its eateries and bars hidden down laneways and side streets amid towering skyscrapers and glamorous hotels.
Much of the venue is informed by Lam’s experiences of living and working in Hong Kong as a chef and later as a designer. “Southside is quite broad in terms of its Asian cuisine, but Central is very much focused on Hong Kong,” Lam says. “That’s the really fun part for me.
We’ve fine-tuned the flavours, but everything is based on the traditional recipes I learned from chefs in Hong Kong, some of them who would now be 80 years old.” Central bills itself as a dumpling bar first and foremost, so dim sum is at the heart of Lam’s menu, which features scallop and prawn dumplings with smoked salmon roe, king crab spring rolls, wild mushroom and water chestnut dumplings, and classic prawn har gow. But there’s also cold starters, a selection of share plates, and items cooked on the barbecue.
For cold starters, there’s pickled lotus root with rose wine, Chinese yam and mint; drunken chicken with aged shaoxing rice wine, red date and golden sesame; white-cut kingfish with ginger radish, spring onion, white soy; and smoked foie gras with youtiao (Chinese fried dough) and Davidson plum. Share plates include steamed Queensland grouper with shiitake mushroom and pickled greens, and a triple cooked Wagyu short rib with crispy potato, red kampot pepper and manuka honey. From the barbecue you might order a classic roasted duck with lilly pilly plum sauce, and Shandong crispy skin chicken with sand ginger, aged vinegar and crispy kai lan.
Accompanying the food is a 250(ish)-bottle wine list compiled by new group wine director Peter Marchant, which mixes Old and New World drops and includes four wines from China. About 30 are available by the glass, half glass and half bottle via Coravin. There’s also a playful cocktail list that includes the Bang Bang, a take on a Harvey Wallbanger that includes mandarin and vanilla and is shaken with egg white, a nitrogen-compressed pina colada called El Tropical and the Space Bass, which twists a grasshopper with tequila, cacao, creme de menthe and panda cream.
It’s all tied together with a booming playlist inspired by 1980s and ’90s Hong Kong nightlife (think Cantonese-sung versions of Material Girl and Lady Marmalade ). And that, despite the group’s reverence for this place’s Primitif history, is perhaps the litmus test of Central – does it remind Lam, who has watched it from inception to completion, of his own freewheeling Hong Kong days? “It does,” he says. “The closer it got to completion, the more I felt I was back in Hong Kong.
That combination of the bar, the music and the [basement] restaurant, it feels like Central.” Open Tue-Sat 5pm-late (Thu-Sat 12pm-late from October 24) 340 Queen Street, Brisbane, (07) 3543 9588 centralbne.com.
au.
