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The Villager Supper Club

Review by Georgia Waters

It’s a strange feeling, ordering food at 1am from a place that doesn’t have fluoroescent overhead lighting and girls holding their heels in their hands.

Strange in a good way. We’re at the top-floor supper club at the few-days-old The Villager on George Street, on the site of the former Little Jumbo and Jorge on George.

It’s early Sunday morning and the place is packed with groups, rather than cosy couples - probably mostly post-Christmas parties. We take a low table at the back of the room and chat about what to order.

Well, try to chat. The place is loud – voices and music crash off the wooden floodboards and walls. It’s not going to be the quiet evening of conversation and cocktails I was hoping for.

The menu is slim but thoughtfully collated. I’m not sure who's ordering from the ‘premium’ cocktails list – the 'West France' with Louis XIII de Remy Martin will set you back $500. The cheapest on the premium list, a Broken Julep, is still out of my budget at $30. But never mind. The regular list, with drinks from $12-$22, is exactly what you hope for in a cocktail list: elegant, grown-up and imaginative.

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We order a Bitter Chocolate Martini ($18) and a Smokin’ Mule ($19) at the bar, and the bartender cheerfully agrees to bring them to our table.

It’s now 1am, dinner was hours ago and the supper menu tempts with upmarket offerings of the sort of food you want to eat after you’ve had a few drinks. There’s croque monsieur (posh cheese and ham on toast) for $5 and chorizo-flavoured popcorn (also $5). We order chicken liver parfait ($9), brandade tartlets ($4 each) and sloppy joes ($12). The parfait arrives fresh-from-the-fridge and too hard, but it’s not bad. The tarts and sloppy joes are good – quality bar food rather than of a restaurant standard. We notice that there’s only one other table with food in front of them – tonight’s crowd seems to be here to drink, not eat.

Our cocktails, however, are excellent. The Bitter Chocolate Nartini (Hendricks gin, Cointreau and Campari with chocolate spirits and bitters) is beautifully tart and not at all rich – like a square of 85% Lindt. The Smokin’ Mule combines rum and Scotch with ginger beer, palm sugar syrup and Kaffir lime. They’re intensely flavoured, designed to be lingered over not swilled.

The staff are superb: fast, professional and friendly.

As we leave, a bartender - perhaps sensing we were looking for a quieter evening - tells us weeknights are more low-key. And when I speak to the bar’s owner, Neil Shannon, a week or so later, he tells me the number of late-night customers going to the supper club to eat, not just drink, has picked up substantially.

Great news. Brisbane already has enough late-night watering holes. Hopefully those looking to party into the wee hours will stick to those, and allow The Villager to fill a long-absent niche in Brisbane’s dining scene.

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