Eat with us, the rotating shortlist
A rotating shortlist of where we actually go in the precinct. Pizza, dumplings, breakfast, Korean, an unfussy bistro. No sponsorships, no affiliate links.
This is a rotating shortlist of where we actually eat in the precinct. It updates roughly monthly. It is not paid, it is not sponsored, and the venues here did not know we were going to write about them. If you are wondering where to bring out-of-town friends, this is the page to bookmark.
Right now, this month
Harry's Pizza. The wood-oven on Brookes Street that we have linked to before. They do a four-cheese with truffle oil that is the order. The dough is fermented for forty-eight hours, which you can tell from the texture. They will open up the back room for groups of eight to ten with a phone call the day before.
The dumpling house with no name. It has a name, but the name is in Mandarin and the English-language sign just says "Restaurant". Three blocks from the train station. Pork and chive dumplings, the soup dumplings if you are early enough that they have not sold out, and the cold sesame noodles. Cash only.
Dovetail. A small bistro that opened late last year. The chef came over from a fine-dining kitchen in Melbourne and is doing a tighter, less fussy version of the same food. The set menu is sixty-five dollars, four courses, no choices, and worth it. They have a weeknight bar menu that is cheaper and faster if you do not have time for the full thing.
The corner cafe. The breakfast staple. The egg sandwich is the move. The coffee is reliably good without being interesting, which is what you want at 8am on a Tuesday.
Old Boy. Korean. The bibimbap is the dish to learn the kitchen with, then move on to the bossam if there are two of you. They have an extensive selection of soju that you should explore at least once.
The standbys we never write about
There is a Vietnamese place on Bridge Street that does a phở we have eaten more than fifty times. There is a Greek place that serves saganaki on a hotplate and lights it on fire at the table, which is pure theatre but also genuinely the best saganaki in the city. There is a Sichuan place where the dan dan noodles are so spicy that we usually order them and then ask for sour cream, which is, the owner has informed us, a "completely incorrect approach", but he serves it anyway.
The full list is longer than this page can comfortably accommodate. We send the longer list to subscribers about once a season.
Notes on bookings, hours, allergies
Every venue listed here takes walk-ins. The two that benefit most from a booking are Dovetail (small dining room) and Harry's Pizza on a Friday or Saturday night.
None of these are particularly suitable for very strict gluten-free diners, but they all handle vegetarian well, and Old Boy does an excellent vegan banchan set if you ask politely. The dumpling house has the worst track record on dietary requirements, in fairness, because the kitchen staff English is limited and they will say yes to most things to be polite even when it is not strictly accurate.
Most of the venues we list keep their hours through public holidays. The dumpling house and the corner cafe close on Lunar New Year and the Tuesday immediately after. The Vietnamese place on Bridge Street takes a two-week break in mid-July every year.
Read next
If you are eating in the precinct this weekend, the what's on calendar is the companion page. The Saturday food-truck roster covers the daytime edge, and the seasonal one-offs sit on the Rosé and Cheese party and Brisbane Gin Festival pages. For service businesses we vouch for, including the courtyard mowing crew, see The Local List.