Brisbane | GlobalSalsa: travel writer Belinda Jackson

May

DON’T MISS: Brisbane May-Sept 2012

Absolutely top of your don’t-miss list this year is
Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado, showing at the Qld Art
Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Spanning four centuries, the big names
include El Greco, Velázquez and Rubens. “Spain was the global power at the
time,” says the
gallery’s International Art curator, David
Burnett. “This exhibition is a huge historical read: it’s a lens through which
we can look at the rest of Europe and the world at that time.” His favourites
in the exhibition include a series of etchings by Goya. A coup for Qld, this is
the first time works from the Museo Nacional del Prado have visited Australia
(QAGOMA, qagoma.qld.gov.au, July 21 – Nov 4).

Next door, at the
newly revamped Qld Museum, the sure-fire blockbuster Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb brings treasures from the British
Museum’s Egyptian collection to Brisbane. Nesperennub was a temple priest and
his 3000-year-old mummified body is on display. The exhibition includes a
fantastic 3D film of his preservation, including the x-ray and CT scans that
helped create a haunting model of his face. The oldest objects date back to
2500BC, and highlights include a beautiful model of a funerary boat, with its
rich colouring still intact (Qld Museum, southbank.qm.qld.gov.au, April 19 -Aug 19)

A footy club’s locker room is the setting of The Truth About Kookaburras, a gritty
murder mystery that opens with 13 naked men on stage. The language is, well,
what you’d expect when a bunch of blokes are talking about last night’s boozy
buck’s night, complete with strippers and, ultimately, a dead man, but it’s the
poignant exploration of men’s changing role in society that will keep you
talking (La Boite Theatre Company, laboite.com.au, June 6-23)

Opera Australia’s 2012
season brings Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Brisbane (May 26 – Jun 8). With lush
costumers and scenery, The Magic Flute is a family-friendly, English-language
version that will have kids entranced by the colour and wild puppetry, while Dream is Baz Luhrmann and designer
Catherine Martin’s celebrated interpretation of the Shakespeare classic is set
in colonial India.

September is festival madness as the Brisbane Festival takes over the city. Highlights include pianist
extraordinaire, Evgeny Kissin, celebrated Belgian dance company les ballets C
de la B and the debut of Symphonia
Eluvium (Symphony of the Floods)
by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, commissioned by the Festival. The
annual event ends with a bang and a fireworks extravaganza, Sunsuper Riverfire.
Hit South Bank early for a good possie (Sept 8-29, brisbanefestival.com.au)

Source: Sun Herald newspaper

May

Fare to remember: Brisbane on a plate

Street art, Burnett Lane

Big names, big tastes and serious coffee define Brisbane’s dining and cafe scenes.

With seafood leaping from ocean to plate, and
forests of tropical fruits, you’re not going to starve in Brisbane, people.

Beautiful and breezy, River Quay, on Southbank, is the
city’s newest open-air restaurant strip. Fast
becoming a local’s fave, Brisbane restaurateur Andrew Baturo’s Popolo is just the ticket for family
Italian: big plates made to share – the veal cutlet is a winner – or small
tastes that let you snack and watch the beautiful people jog the riverbanks in
very tight shorts. Order the Kingaroy sucking pig, fast becoming Popolo’s
signature dish, just to spite them.

The other big-news resident on South Bank is Melbourne’s Stokehouse, which now has a Queensland
cousin, and chef Tony Kelly has brought ‘The Bombe,’ a frozen white chocolate
parfait, to a new wave of adorers. Bar aficionados are making a beeline for the
Stoke Bar’s more laid-back tasting plates and signature cocktails. The views
here are pure Brisbane: river, cityscape, mangroves.

Harajuka Gyoza, Fortitude Valley

At the
other end of the budget, you’ll have to elbow the locals out of the way at
Japanese newcomer Harajuku Gyoza,
which has a devoted following for its Kirin on tap and grilled duck gyoza. It
doesn’t hurt that the Fortitude Valley winner is cheap for snacking – a plate
of five gyoza will set you back $8 – and it’s definitely cheerful, with walls
of Jap-pop kitch and plenty of shouting.

Locals will tell you they’re torn
between Harajuka Gyoza and the hipper Brunswick
Social, another new opener, also serving fried and steamed dumplings, also
$8 a plate, but with cocktails for grown-ups, rather than easy-going beer
steins. Open til late, late, late on weekend nights, it’s a pleasant
alternative to the 1am kebab.

In times
past, southerners would gnash their teeth and swear there wasn’t a decent
coffee past the Qld border, but Brisbane’s caffeine scene is a-buzzing. In the
city, Brew burrows underground into Burnett
Lane, a service lane that’s suddenly gone hip, thanks to local efforts to
fashion a laneways culture. Brew’s studenty sofas belie series caffeine intent:
not content with its single origin coffees, it’s now serving cold drip and siphon
coffee to go, in what’s fast becoming the chic strip of the city. New
neighbours on the lane, which runs parallel to Queen St Mall, include The Survey Co Bistro for classic dining
in edgy surrounds.

Notable
are the the drive-through
cafés by Brissy roaster Merlo, which
churns out its daily-roasted private blend to loyal locals who zip through,
arms outstretched for a hit. Its hour-long Coffee Appreciation brekkys and brunches lets you peek
at roasters, sample a few beans and get some expert advice on the best in home
brewing. Classes are held at its five
torrefaziones. Don’t know what a torrefazione is? Better turn up.

Wedged
amongst the vintage shops and seriously fabulous restaurants on Woolloongabba’s
tiny uber-block on Logan Rd, you kinda wish Pearl Café was your local. With smooth brews and a counter of fresh
cream cakes from the upstairs kitchen, Pearl’s also finessing its charcuterie
table and private dining room. The clientele is bronzed and beautiful, yet the
mood is Gallic, so order up with the French toast for a calorific start to the
day, and delude yourself that your gentle amble home will work it off.

River delight

Sweet,
salty and naughtily buttery, chef Ryan Squires’ grilled sweet corn parfait with
caramel popcorn and tarragon is worth the trip north. The Queensland lad, who’s
cut it in the world’s top kitchens, now has a riverside home at Esquire and his charcoal grill is
working miracles. Time-poor degustation devotees already know about the new lunchtime
pre-fixe three dishes for $35 in the pared-down Esq; a fine-dining bargain (145
Eagle St, CBD, esquire.net.au)

Aria, Eagle St Pier, CBD, ariarestaurant.com

Brew, Burnett La, CBD, brewgroup.com.au

Brunswick Social 367 Brunswick
Street, Fortitude Valley

Canvas, 16 Logan Rd, Woolloongabba, canvasclub.com.au

Harajuka Gyoza, 394 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley,
harajukagyoza.com

Merlo drive-through, 104 McLachlan St, Fortitude
Valley, 78 LaTrobe Tce, Paddington, merlo.com.au

Ortiga, 446 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley,
ortiga.com.au

Pearl, 28 Logan Rd, Woolloongabba,

Popolo, River
Quay, South Bank, popolodining.com

Stokehouse,
Sidon St, South Bank, stokehousebrisbane.com.au

Source: Sun Herald newspaper

May

BRISBANE FOR… families, lovers, foodies & sports fans

Families: ‘Big,
loud, fun’ is the tagline for the Workshops Rail Museum, where kids 2-12 years can
drive a diesel or a tilt train, and the nippers’ railway adventure playground
has goods trains, boom gates and a central station. Everything in this
award-winning museum is designed to be touched, climbed on, pushed or pulled.
North Street, North Ipswich, theworkshops.qm.qld.gov.au

Lovers: What better way to declare your heart than to bedeck your beloved
with vintage-inspired jewels by celebrated jeweller Chelsea De Luca? Nope, we can’t think
of anything to top that. Local gal
Chelsea’s following includes Beyonce and Gwyneth Paltrow,
76 James St, chelseadeluca.com.au

Foodies: The Spring Cooking School’s express
one-hour tapas classes will help you keep up with the Hyphen-Jones at your next
cocktail party, and have a great lunch at the same time. The three-hour classes
with guest chefs cover, for example, the secrets of bouillabaisse or red duck
curry, 26 Felix St, CBD, spring.com.au

Sport fans: Take a 1½ hour sunset kayaking trip up the
Brisbane River to see the city light up, then reward yourself with a plate of
fresh ocean king prawns and an icy beer or Aussie wine in the classic Brissy
marriage of Paddle &Prawns. Every
Friday night, riverlife.com.au

Sun Herald www.smh.com.au

Apr

Priest keeps mum about temple secrets, now unwrapped by scientists

Looking inside the mummy to Nesperennub.

Last week, I had a sneak peak at a 3000-year-old-man. Sounds a bit naughty, but he had all his clothes on, and more.

Nesperennub was a temple priest in Thebes (now Luxor), whose mummified body now rests in the British Museum’s Egyptology collection.

The priest is now holidaying in Brisbane, and is the headline act in Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb, an exhibition that opens tomorrow, Thursday 19 April, at the Queensland Museum.

There are four mummies in the exhibition, including the body of Tjayasetimun, a singer in the temple of Amun.

“Sometimes, I look at her and I think about the hopes, dreams and memories of each object,” one of the curators told me as we wandered around the exhibition. “That’s why we investigate.”

One of the coolest things is the 3D movie at the entrance. It shows the CT and X-ray scans used to analyse the mummy, without unwrapping him and ultimately destroying his fragile frame. From this, a rather lifelike model of the priest’s face was constructed, and is also on display.

For tickets: http://www.southbank.qm.qld.gov.au/Events+and+Exhibitions/Exhibitions/2012/04/Mummy+Secrets+of+the+Tomb

Mar

BRISBANE: We’re going north on an urban safari

Neither
floods nor cyclones can dent the relentless reinvention of Brisbane, with celeb
chefs and real espresso all over town.

In a city where, traditionally, the word
‘hip’ is automatically aligned with ‘replacement’, it’s been a tough slog to
otherwise convince to southerners and the hordes who’ve fled the northern
capital every decade that Brisbane now is truly a cool city.

“Hip Brisbane?” said a friend
who’d grown up in Brissy in the 60s, fled and never gone back. “Visit
first, then try to convince me.”

And with its reputation and streets taking
a battering in the recent floods, Brisbane has used it as an excuse to give the
city a good scrubbing to emerge gleaming in the late-summer sunshine.

If my Brisbane escapee friend had spent just a couple of hours with me one
sunny morning, she may have started to relent. My hotel, the newly opened Spicer’s Balfour, is a renovated Queenslander in inner-city New Farm, with
just nine guest rooms, wide verandas for breakfasting, a rooftop bar and
open-air reception with views across to the Story Bridge and into the neighbours’
capacious back yards.

As a schoolgirl in rural Queensland, my memories of
Brissy are of brawling with the siblings while dad drove in endless circles
around the city streets, cursing the Big Smoke and inevitably ending up out the
front of the XXXX brewery. Now, locals cruise the city on bikes, ferries, along
riverside promenades: Brisbanites
are no slouches – you’ll find them running marathons before breakfast, pounding
through the city’s lush parklands, riding the riverside trails or sauntering
the city streets. No wonder they’re mainlining big
breakfasts at eight: they’ve been up before dawn, catching the sunshine.
Remember the old Flo Bjelke-Petersen joke? No daylight saving, thank you. It
fades the curtains.

But
it’s not just me who’s rethinking Brisbane: Matt Moran opened his Brisbane Aria last year, Spaniard Pablo
Tordesillas moved up north by way of Woolloomooloo’s Otto to open Ortiga,
named the country’s top restaurant in 2010 and the town’s still talking about
its coup in scoring fashion designer Akira
Igosawa’s latest boutique and Hermes’ arrival in December.

This
is not a one-way street of pale southerners heading north to woo the
white-pants brigade. November saw gong-winning Brisbane bar Byblos open in Melbourne, Nat-Sui shoes beloved by well-hoofed
celebs from Tara Moss to The Veronicas is coming to Woolloomooloo and Newtown’s
Campos Coffee opened a Brisbane outpost
long before coming to Melbourne late last year.
In fact, the Brisbane café was recently named Australia’s best by Lifestyle Channel viewers, and the waiters
are as effortlessly condescending as any Sydney NIDA graduate-cum-barista.

Bringing coffee to the south? It just smacks of selling ice to eskimos.
It’s long been held you can’t get a decent espresso in Brissy, so I do a
double-take in front of the drive-through café by Brissy-bunch-made-good, Merlo, which churns out its daily-roasted
private blend to loyal locals who zip past, arms stretched out from their shiny
black BMWs and Audis to receive a hit.

Brisbane’s coffee aficionados tell me the new barista at French café Cirque is totally amaaaaaaaazing, but,
this still being Queensland, I miss lunch twice in a row because the kitchen
closes up, quick-smart, at 2.30pm. Not so much the Land of the Long Lunch, but
the Land of the Early Lunch. But I guess if you’ve been up since the crack of
dawn, you’re not going to wait till 3pm to eat.

I only just scrape in for a late lunch (after some begging) at the Gun Shop Café, Delicious magazine’s
café of the year 2010 and named in Gourmet Traveller’s top 20 brekkys. The
little 65-seat café, which endured a sluicing during the floods, churns out up
to 350 breakfasts each Sunday morning from 7am till 12.30pm (there’s that early
closing bell again).

“It doesn’t matter if you’re Premier Anna Bligh or a homeless bloke
who’s scrounged enough for a coffee, everyone still has to queue,” says chef-owner
Jason Coolen, who is easing into dinners, starting with Friday and
Saturday nights and has just finished extending out the back, to the delight of
the mid-morning pram brigade. “I’ve got kids, (mate) Matt Moran’s got kids. Why
do we want to knock that market back?”

The service I get on the Brisbane food scene is, with the exception of
Campos, endearingly informal, with all the enthusiasm of a young Labrador who
just wants to be your friend and tell you their favourite dish on the menu,
with a large chunk of life story thrown in for good measure. They’re not
flirting, but it’s kinda cute, to wit the bouncy boy bringing out platters of
local snapper, Kimberley barramundi and Hervey Bay scallops at South Bank Surf Club, the new
restaurant by TV chef Ben O’Donoghue
of Surfing the Menu fame. Ben himself
delivers a starter rack of oysters to us three gleeful girls, who throw a
bottle of South Australian riesling into the mix and perch out on the veranda.

While we hoe in, the Brissy girls recall how they used to leap into
the nearby man-made South Bank beach
for a quick sobering-up swim, jeans and all after a night on the town. The
beach is currently closed while an army of trucks repair the flood damage, but
when it’s in the swing, sunny Sunday afternoons see this restaurant, which aims
to become carbon-neutral, pumps with hungry and thirsty swimmers.

If we weren’t eating at Ben’s new joint, we could have popped into Sardine Tin for late-night tapas (yes,
Brisbane, like Sydney and Melbourne is certainly not immune to the charms of
Spanish food served in minutiae) or any
of the tiny bars along South Brisbane’s casual strip, where well-behaved
drinkers lounge on tables along the pavements in the warm evening air.

It’s certainly more
lively than Brisbane’s Queen St Mall, which moves from Vuitton to Supré in just
two short blocks. Never have I seen so many bra straps and Brissy’s perpetual
fascination with mini-dresses means it’s well in style at the moment. It’s hard
to find the local gems unless you are tipped off. Totally this-minute menswear
is found in Dirtbox, relocated
beside its newly reopened sister shop Bessie
Head in the otherwise drab Broadway Mall, and little ‘Tokyo-centric’ Apartment, stocking Comme Des Garcons
and US coolster brand Carhartt, is hidden in a basement on neighbouring
Elizabeth St. Brisbane’s own Easton
Pearson lives in Fortitude Valley’s slick main drag, James St, near
fashion incubator The Tribune and local upcoming label Subfusco.

In fact,
the Valley is back on the hot list, thanks largely to the The
Emporium complex, home to
the second hotel I road-test here. The suburb
is giving its spicy rep as a hotbed of dirty drinking dens the heave-ho, thanks
to such establishments as Emporium, which took out Gourmet Traveller’s best
small luxury hotel in 2009 and again in 2010, but one local still slips up: “Why,
it’s just a vomit’s spit from the nightclub scene,” they say guilelessly. I spy
a few clubs with that boarded-up look all nightclubs have in daylight, but the
queen on the scene is luxe, opulent Cloudland,
with its crazily lush organic theme complete with waterfalls, garden walls and
a retractable roof.

The Emporium hotel hits a few sour notes, with windows I can’t seem to
open, additional charge for wi-fi and a chilly lap pool, but the rooms are
well-designed and spacious, and it sits beside the current hottest meal ticket
in town, Tartufo.

This Wednesday night, Tartufo
is turning back those without bookings, which we sail smugly past. Chef Tony Percuoco’s kitchen must run itself, as he’s out on
the floor between courses, laughing and chatting, a more carefree chef I’ve
never seen. Formerly of the Gold Coast’s
Ristorante Fellini and an
apprentice at Bennelong way back in the 70s, he’s always loved Brisbane. “It
just reminded me of Sydney when we arrived, back in 1972,” he says without a whiff
of condensation.

The catchphrase in Brisbane at the moment is ‘urban villages’, and Woolloongabba
is the hottest of the lot for antique and vintage shops as
well as some truly stellar eating houses, just down the road from that iconic
stadium, the Gabba.

A word about the
Wollongabba strip: it’s small. It’s really small. It’s, like, a block long. Yet
you could quite comfortably spend a day there, starting with coffee at Pearl, then a poke amongst the antique
centre and emporium for vintage Chanel and retro homewares, dinner at Bistrot Bistro or 1889
Enoteca (home of 2010’s best wine list in all Oz) and a cheeky little
post-dinner rendezvous at Crosstown Eating House’s new bar, or in sparkling
new Canvas, with tapas by Matt Moran (yeah, he’s loving Brisbane) and
rum-tastic cocktails. A hot tip: Tuesdays is tapas and tequila night, where $30
will get you two beautifully crafted marguerites and three tapas.

Canvas is typical of
the new edginess in Brissy – its walls are handpainted by local street artists
Jimmy Bligs and Teibo, and the street grunge theme continues at Edwina Corlette’s edgy gallery, a
pleasant find as I’m tottering around New Farm in an attempt to negate the
calorie binge by way of window shopping. That’s her window, splashed in vivid
red, yellow and black painted roadsigns by Aboriginal-Chinese artist Jason
Wing.

If you thought you
could see everything in Brisbane at home in Sydney, praps think again. We all
know Gallery of Modern Art’s (aka GOMA) coup with its recent Valentino Retrospective exhibition,
which saw more than 8000 visitors on one of the final Sundays, and the
afternoon I visit is packed with what appears to be the AGM of the Country
Women’s Association, dissecting sleeves insets and sable-trim armholes.

The riverside GOMA says
it was lucky to sustain only minimal damage, but the whole precinct, including
the Qld Art Gallery is currently closed, but expected to be open before the end
of the month. When it does open its doors, GOMA’s current exhibition, they
promise, will blow you away. The Tracey Moffatt photos and Minnie Pwerles are stacked
away and the whole space given over to 21st Century: Art in the First Decade. Opened 18 December until 25
April, it features 180 artworks by 110 artists from 40 countries, some on loan
from the world’s most prestigious galleries, others new acquisitions. We’re
talking balloons, swimming pools, live zebra finches, wormholes that snake
through the building…it’s even got its own blog, www.21cblog.com.

While I’ve spent most of my time in the
Valley, New Farm, West End and Woolloongabba, there are yet more booming areas to check out: Paddington
for its vintage strip, the post-flood scrubbed Eagle Street Pier for eating, the waterfront down at newly chi-chi
Teneriffe, the old jail that’s now The Barracks’ food and shopping haunt and
the café scene at Milton.

Does that mean a return visit? “Don’t
donate to flood appeals, come up and spend your money enjoying the Brisbane
sunshine!” the locals tell me. Dammit, it’d be un-Austrayian not to. So if
‘hip’ meant feeling angst, wearing black and not eating fresh mango for
breakfast, then give hip the heave. I’ll take New Farm, not New York.

ADDRESS BOOK

1889
Enoteca, 10-12 Logan Rd,
Wolloongabba

Bistrot
Bistro, 14 Logan Rd, Wolloongabba

Brisbane
Aria, No. 1 Eagle St,
Eagle St Pier, CBD

Byblos
Portside Wharf 39 Hercules Street, Hamilton

Campos
Coffee, 11 Wandoo
St, Fortitude Valley

Canvas, 16b Logan Rd,
Woolloongabba

Edwina
Corlette Gallery, 2/555 Brunswick St, New Farm

Gun
Shop Café, 53
Mollison St, West End

Merlo
drive-through café, 104 McLachlan St, Fortitude Valley

Ortiga, 446 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley

Pearl
Café, 28 Logan Rd,
Wolloongabba

South Bank Surf Club, 30aa
Stanley Plaza Parklands, South Brisbane

Tartufo, Emporium
Brisbane, 1000 Ann St, Fortitude Valley

STAYING THERE Best of the boutiques: Spicer’s Balfours (37 Balfour St, New
Farm, 07 3358 8888, www.spicersgroup.com.au)
Chester’s (closed in February for
renovation, 26 Chester St, Fortitude Valley,07 3852 2218, www.chestershotel.com) Limes (142 Constance St, Fortitude
Valley, 07 3852 9000, www.limeshotel.com.au)
and Emporium (1000 Ann St, Fortitude
Valley, 07 3253 6918,www.emporiumhotel.com.au
)

FOR MORE INFORMATION Get your hands on the excellent (yet
free!) Good Guide, a new series of
fantastic little guides on four Brisbane pockets. Find in the smaller hotels,
real estate agents or online with interactive maps, www.goodguide.net.au Check Travel Queensland for packages www.queenslandholidays.com and
download Brisbane Marketing’s new
online guide, www.visitbrisbane.com.au/Travel/VisitorGuide/

Aug

Where good looks count: Clear Mountain Lodge, Brisbane

Here’s a little tale about a lodge on Brisbane’s far northern fringe, near Samford. So I played down the arguments about the GPS, but it truly was a grim, bleak drive up to the lodge. Well worth it, really.

IT IS a cold and windy night, the night we head to Clear Mountain Lodge, a small hotel about 35 minutes’ drive north of the Brisbane city centre.

The lodge is, unsurprisingly, at the top of lonely Clear Mountain, in Brisbane’s little-known hinterland. In the dark of night, having been unceremoniously stranded in Queensland thanks to Chilean volcanic ash clouds, the lodge could be on the moon, for all I can see.

Thank goodness for the GPS, the neo-tech husband says. I’ll switch off my Walkman so I can hear you call me antediluvian but I just don’t trust them. So we argue all the way to Clear Mountain, before calling the hotel to check its location.

“Just drive to the top of the hill. You can’t miss it,” the receptionist says. “Don’t follow the GPS and go on Old School Road. It’ll send you down a four-wheel-drive track through a forest.” Tres Wolf Creek.

Click here to read more.

Jan

Jacarandas and moody blues

“BALFOUR Street, New Farm?” asks the airport bus driver. “Are you sure? There used to be a real rough, scuzzy backpackers’ down there.”

“No, really. There’s a new hotel and it’s supposed to be quite swish,” I assure him. The rest of the minibus has its ears open, so it’s with a flourish the garrulous driver pulls up in front of the wide verandahs of an urbane-looking Queenslander and declares: “Well, that’s a turn-up for the books. Not bad looking at all.”

click here to read more about Spicers Balfour, in Brisbane. Yes, Brisbane.

Nov

CPI: the cappucino index

According to the most CPI (that’s Cappuccino Price Index to you), Brisbane has the most expensive coffee in the country.

A cuppa will set you back on average $3.31 compared with $3.22 in Melbourne and $3.06 in Sydney.

This tidbit cropped up while I was shooting an Obama blend (‘yes we can!’) espresso in the new Campos cafe in Melbourne.

Campos originally started in Sydney’s capital of grunge, Newtown, and the Brisbane cafe recently was named Australia’s 2010 best coffee, according to Lifestyle Channel viewers… so if you know and trust a LC watcher, then you’d better make tracks to the Valley in BrisVegas.

The Melbourne staff delighted in showing off The Slayer (“How do you spell that?” “You know, like the American band”) a new-style espresso machine from the US that costs $23,000 and there are only 15 in Australia so far.

Despite the Slayer’s best efforts, I realised I’m not an espresso girl anymore, but I’d go back to 144 Elgin St, in Carlton for another of their creamy piccolo lattes. They’re pitching against some serious heavyweights (think St Ali in South Yarra, Seven Seeds on the other side of Carlton), but you know what they say about Melburnians – three or more standing together and someone’ll wheel an espresso machine by…

Oct

The recipe for world peace? Choux pastry and mangoes

“Hip Brisbane?” said a friend who’d grown up in Brissy in the 60s. “Visit first, then try to convince me.”

If she’d spend just a couple of hours with me this morning, she may have started to relent. The hotel, Spicer’s Balfour, is a nine-room Queenslander (painted weatherboard with wide verandas, a rooftop bar and open-air reception) in New Farm with views across to the Story Bridge and into the back yards of the neighbours, which I love. To paraphrase George Negus, I’m a suburban perv.

Yesterday, I ate lunch at a nearby cafe, the Little Larder, then found I’d left my wallet behind. “No worries,” said the sparky girl serving me. “Just pop in tomorrow!” So I did, and at 8am, the cafe, on a relatively quiet street, was full with a happy buzz of Wednesday morning breakfasters. Who breakfasts out on a Wednesday morning? Brisbanites, it would appear.

And then I swung past Chouquette, which has been turning out the butteriest, Frenchest pastries since before it opened at 6.30 this morning. The smell, people, is a scent to inspire you to write poetry, solve cryptics and create world peace.

Just $1.50 bought me a little bag of chouquettes, sweet little balls of cream puff, rolled in pearl sugar, for a crunch in the mouth. My snack bag of dried fruits has been slung into the dark recesses of my suitcase. Again, this cafe had a scattering of regular patrons sipping milky coffee and buying fresh olive batons – so lucky to have such a gem in their neighbourhood.

The mood in these little streets is relaxed, the scent is of gardenias, jasmine and freshly baked bread, the spring temps are perfect. If ‘hip’ meant feeling angst, wearing black and not eating fresh mango for breakfast, then give hip the heave. I’ll take New Farm (not New York).

Follow