Brisbane Night Noodle Markets 2015: a taste of the menu

The transformation from quiet riverside park to vibrant street food market has begun with South Bank set to host the second annual Night Noodle Markets in the cultural forecourt, starting this week.

More than 25 food stalls will be set up from July 22 to August 2, serving the likes of lobster bao, beef pho, Taiwanese chicken wings and Korean bulgogi sliders.

Good Food talks to two new vendors about their food, their restaurants and what they'll be dishing up at the upcoming markets. Other restaurants participating include Sake, Madame Wu, Fat Noodle, New Shanghai, Mrs Luu's and Harajuku Gyoza. For the full list of stallholders and their menus, go to goodfoodmonth.com/menu

Rogue Spice Canteen

For someone whose life was once governed by them, Shannon Oey seems to take great pleasure these days in breaking the rules.

The former professional tennis player is chef/owner of Rogue Spice Canteen in New Farm, one of the Brisbane restaurants that will be operating a stall at the Night Noodle Markets this year (from July 22 to August 2).

"When food is good, it's good. It shouldn't be about what you can and can't do. Look at [chef and owner of Nahm in Bangkok] David Thompson. He's a rule breaker," Oey says. "Most of my good dishes are born from mistakes."

Oey came to cooking late in life, after having to give giving up the tennis circuit due to injury.

"While travelling around the world on the tennis circuit sounds glamorous, behind the scenes it was a different story and there were lots of empty days spent hanging around hotel rooms. While others hit the Playstations, I would go and and find cooking classes to do. I'd always loved Asian food, but I'd never considered it very refined or technique-driven. Then when I came back to Australia after living in Florida, I found out more about it, through places such as Longrain and people like David Thompson and it changed my life."

At 28, Oey enrolled full-time in a culinary course at TAFE for a year then got a job at the Hyatt at Sanctuary Cove.

"As far as this type of cooking goes, however, I am self-taught. I went back and forth to Sydney and Melbourne on eating trips, to absorb and try to work it out myself. My father is Indonesian and we lived there and in Hong Kong so the ingredients and flavours are familiar to me, it was just about learning and refining my technique."

Street food is Oey's particular passion, south-east Asia his focus.

"I love street food, where people with modest backgrounds cook in their small kitchens with their mums or grandparents. I worked at a high end hatted restaurant and while the food is amazing, it's not accessible to everyone, it's cooking to a niche crowd. Food shouldn't be intimidating."

Seven months ago, he opened the unpretentious Rogue, where a main dish with rice or roti and salad averages about $15.

We have people come in, students scrabbling around for change to pay. And they leave happy having eaten our 12 hour beef ribs. And I think, 'That's my job done'."

Longtime

As is so often the case, it was travel that led Tyron Simon to open Brisbane's Longtime.

"I had friends in Thailand so I was spending a lot of time there. We'd go out to dinner all the time; everything from street food to Nahm.

"When I came back to Australia, I'd crave Thai food, but nothing ever really satisfied me. The quality just wasn't there and I realised that while we had lots of little 'ma and pa' Thai places, there was nothing really beyond. The other states seemed to have good Thai places but we didn't. That's how Longtime was born."

Simon had a friend who cooked in the royal palace in Bangkok, so she was the first part of the team. Soon he'd lured Ben Bertai from the Spirit House at Yandina as well.

"Whatever my sales pitch was, it worked," Simon says.

Bertai says he was ready to come back to the city. "After five years, the time was right and being given creative control was an opportunity too good to refuse."

It was one of the most anticipated openings of the year and has been a sensation almost since it opened.

"The wait on Friday and Saturday can be between one and a half and two hours," Simon says. "Tuesday nights have been the biggest surprise, when we can do up to 150 and still have a wait list."

Set in a dimly-lit, bunker-like room hung with greenery, with a hidden alleyway entrance, Longtime has developed a reputation as a buzzy good-time destination, and with a policy of no-bookings after 6.30pm, it's one of the few places in Brisbane that you'll see a queue.

"I wanted a location that hadn't been a restaurant before, that people had never been to. It's about the disconnecting with the world outside. I'm sure there are far better designed places but what we're offering is the chance to forget your problems and escape," Simon says.

The Longtime menu was born of Simon's memories of meals in Thailand and Bertai's own travel experiences there along with five and a half years at the Spirit House and before that Longrain in Melbourne.

The menu has been tweaked along the way, with Moreton Bay bug curry developing a name as their signature, but a much more humble dish, pad se ew, proving the surprise star.

"It's so simple – a dish you'd find on the street in Bangkok. It's just salt and vinegar cured pork, deep-fried noodles and greens with oyster sauce, fried garlic and pickled chilli, but everyone loves it," Bertai says.

The chef admits a touch of nerves when it comes to the Night Noodle Markets. "Logistically it's hard, and I think it's going to be incredibly busy, but at the end you look back and go 'hey that was great, let's do it again'."

After the Night Noodle Markets, the pair are off to Thailand, in search of further culinary inspiration.

Rogue Spice Canteen's Night Noodle Markets menu

Char-grilled coconut ribs with tamarind glaze

Caramelised 12-hour pork belly with green apple salad

Indonesian yellow chicken curry

Sticky spicy chicken wings

Longtime's Night Noodle Markets menu

Cheesy chicken "spring rolls"

Pork belly pad see ew

Chicken penang curry (pictured below)

The Night Noodle Markets run from July 22 to August 2 during Good Food Month, presented by Citi. Open Mon-Thu 5pm-late; Fri 4pm-late; Sat-Sun 2pm-late. Entry is free. See brisbane.goodfoodmonth.com