Brisbane – An Introduction to Eating and Drinking

Over the past decades we have made many trips to Brisbane to sample the food and drinks without being too excited about many of the venues. We have also noticed the continuous encroachment on the CBD and surrounding areas of ugly, too-high apartment blocks which have turned whole areas into wind tunnels.

It was therefore interesting to pay a recent visit where we found a new dynamism in the food and wine scene with many new and exciting restaurants and cafés popping up and some of our old favourites still providing excellent offerings (but the apartment blocks are still ugly).

This story highlights places to visit if you want to try interesting food, exciting wines, good coffee and other venues that foodtourists seek out.

This is a brief introduction as we need to go back here a few more times to really bet under the skin of this sprawling city.

We must start with two of our recent finds namely Snack Man and Happy Boy, both of which have the same ownership and both of which serve excellent food and very interesting wines. They sit next to each other in East Street, Fortitude Valley. You can read our story about Snack Man here and you can peruse their menu here.

We were also very impressed with our visit to a restaurant on the edge of Fortitude Valley called Agnes. This is a relaxed place with excellent service that cooks extremely tasty food over fire. We thoroughly enjoyed our meal here and will certainly put it on our list to visit again on our next Brisbane adventure.

A place that we have enjoyed in the past is Gauge in South Brisbane. We were keen to visit again to see how things have changed since our last visit which was pre-Covid. We were not disappointed. Our lunch was tasty with dishes that were interesting and well thought out.

There is another old favourite that is still going strong that we didn’t have time to get to but we are still happy to recommend it for both the food and the wine. Enoteca 1889 serves excellent Italian influenced dishes and excellent wines imported by the owner. It is well-worth a visit.

A pleasant surprise was a relatively new restaurant called Stanley which crouches under the iconic Story Bridge. It is a large restaurant churning our very good Chinese dishes. The service is also excellent.

We are always looking for good coffee options and the best that we found among many attempts was Industry Beans, once again, in Fortitude Valley. This is an offshoot of the Melbourne roaster of the same name that started operations in Fitzroy and then have expanded within Melbourne and subsequently to Sydney and Brisbane. It is a sleek, light-filled space and the range of coffee is very good, with both washed and natural process options being available.

We will add more to this summary after future visits.