An ambitious Valley steakhouse opens with a former TV chef in the kitchen
An in-demand designer has helped transform an old nightclub into a plush dining room. It’s serving 1.1-kilo tomahawks, wagyu bolognaise and a 230-bottle wine list.
A beef company opening its own restaurant? It’s not the kind of news that necessarily fills you with confidence.
Stanbroke likes to talk about being a family business (in this case, the Menegazzo family), but it’s also one of the largest privately owned integrated beef and cattle companies in the world.
Sell your product to a restaurant, sure. Open a restaurant of your own? Perhaps not.
But hear Julian Simmonds out.
“We’re very experienced in supplying to the top restaurants around the world [Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen in Singapore and Hong Kong, and Nusret “Salt Bae” Gökçe’s Nusr-Et in Dubai],” says Simmonds, Stanbroke’s general manager of property and investments. “We’ve been in that game for many, many years ... [We had an opportunity] to bring some of those world-class learnings we have of supplying some of the best chefs in the world back to our home of Brisbane.”
You can tell a lot of thought has gone into Establishment 203, Stanbroke’s Italian-influenced steakhouse, which opened this week on the corner of Ann and Marshall streets in Fortitude Valley.
The design (which featured input from in-demand interior designer Tamsin Johnson) is a knockout, with its fluted marble and sizeable velvet booths. The entire venue is enclosed in glass bricks, and a banquette runs down one side of the venue, framed by antique-style mirrors.
But those details are matched by practical considerations such as carpeted floors, and acoustic treatment on the ceilings and the underside of the tables. Building a handsome restaurant is one thing; making it a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours requires more insight.
“We’ve had an opportunity to travel and see what works best in these venues, in Dubai and Asia,” says Simmonds, a former Brisbane councillor and federal Ryan MP.
“We’ve brought a lot of that back home in terms of the acoustics, the fitout, the music.”
And then there’s the murderers’ row who’s running the place.
Much has been made of former Surfing the Menu host Ben O’Donoghue as 203’s executive chef, but there’s also Remon Van de Kerkhof (previously Oncore by Clare Smyth in Sydney) leading the front-of-house, and regular diners around town will recognise senior team members such as Cedric Gautier (SK Steak & Oyster, Coppa Spuntino) and Aleks Balodis (Siffredi’s, Stokehouse Q). In short, you’re in good hands here.
All this in the old Monastery and Oh Hello! nightclub premises. Admittedly, despite the luscious treatment, you don’t have to squint too hard to remember your 20-something self’s worst decisions – there’s always been something particular about the dimensions of this space. It’s just that there’s now a cutting-edge kitchen where the dance floor used to be.
Behind its low-set benches, O’Donoghue is using a Mibrasa woodfire station and an expansive MKN induction system (the first of its kind in Brisbane) to prepare a relatively efficient menu that squeezes in all your typical modern touchstones – kingfish crudo, beef tartare, oysters with apple cider mignonette, and so on.
Elsewhere on the entrees, there’s wood-fired marrow bone with caponata and bruschetta; Sommerlad pasture-raised chicken liver parfait with pickled figs and grilled focaccia; and Mooloolaba king prawns with zucchini trifolati, and lemon and Calabrian chilli butter.
The larger plates are split between steaks, pasta and other mains.
There are 14 different cuts on the steak menu, ranging from a grass-fed 200-gram eye fillet all the way up to a three-score 1.1-kilogram dry-aged Angus tomahawk, which will set you back a tidy $260. There’s also a six-score wagyu menu that features a rump cap, a flat iron, a rib eye and a bone-in sirloin.
Most of the pastas are house-made (the menu says “home made”, but rest assured O’Donoghue isn’t busting out the coat hangers in the family kitchen). There’s spaghetti alle vongole, cappellacci filled with roasted pumpkin and buffalo ricotta, and a wagyu tonnarelli bolognaise.
The rest of the mains mix the fancy with the fancy-free.
There’s live southern rock lobster grilled with lemon and fresh garlic butter, herb and salt crust-baked Glacier 51 toothfish, and Brisbane Valley quail saltimbocca with prosciutto, sage and grilled radicchio. But, this being a Ben O’Donoghue kitchen, there’s also a signature burger – consider one of these with a beer in Establishment’s slick bar area as your new pre-Valley go-to.
Matching the food is a focused 230(ish)-bottle wine list. Whites and roses are split evenly between old world and new, before things get very Italian with an impressive collection of barolos and barbarescos. Up front, there’s a thoughtful selection of drops by the glass and Coravin.
Away from wine, there’s a lengthy cocktail list of signatures, classics and twists.
“Brisbane residents have been really, really great and welcoming,” Simmonds says. “It’s a new venue, and in terms of how the city’s growing up, I think we’ll see more and more of these quality venues come online because our [dining] culture can certainly sustain it.”
Open Tue 5pm-late; Wed-Sat 12pm-late.
6 Marshall Street, Fortitude Valley, (07) 3186 1133.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.