Casual Dining - Fiesta Ole Mexican Cuisine

https://www.facebook.com/fiestaolebrisbane

Given it was a Thursday night, we'd initially planned to have a quite night at home and SC had actually planned to have one of her two fasting days for the week.  That all changed pretty quickly when we received a text around lunch time from our mate DruBoy asking if we wanted to check out a new Mexican restaurant in the Valley.  It's not unusual to get a late request from DruBoy, the last of which was a free ticket to see Jamie Oliver and his crew, an offer in which I would have jumped at if the offer wasn't the next day and in Sydney!  Anyway, this offer was a little less dramatic and always keen to check out new restaurants, we agreed to catch up.

There's been so many high profile restaurants opening in the last few months, it's pretty easy to miss out on the smaller openings and Fiesta Ole was just such a restaurant.  Located on Turbot Street just around the corner from the Valley Woolworths complex, it would be pretty easy to miss the little Mexican diner unless you knew it was there.  Fiesta Ole is actually in a little shop that we used to walk past all the time when doing our shopping in the Valley Woolies which never seemed to have tenants for very long.  It had been ages since we walked past that little shop so we had absolutely no idea that it had changed yet again.

Melbourne Series - Mamasita

http://www.mamasita.com.au/

There has been a restaurant that I've tried to get to a couple of times during visits to Melbourne and in fact, I had already tried unsuccessfully to get into it during my Melbourne food safari (see post here).  I've always had a problem with queuing at restaurants and on the whole object of the concept, which is why I've had trouble getting to Mamasita.  When it comes to queuing at restaurants, Mamasita has a unique reputation in foodie circles - it's just accepted that you will get along and spend time watching the back of someone else's head while waiting to get in (or if you are more industrious, make new friends).

After our failed attempt on Valentine's Day to queue and get in, we decided that we would try again the following day and get in for a Saturday lunch.  Mamasita opens from 12:30pm on a Saturday and to avoid queuing for a long time, we thought we would get there around 12pm and hopefully get towards the front of the queue.  No such luck, there were already about thirty people ahead of us in the queue and some of those were single people propping up the queue waiting for their friends to join.  Thinking that it would be 'now or never', we set in for a wait with the hope that we would score a table (like we did at Momofuku Noodle bar in NYC - see post here).

While we waited in the queue, we did strike up a conversation with some people in front of us, just to see if they had been before and what they thought about the wait - clearly not too impressed either.  I could hear lots of comment from people in the queue - in particular a hope and desire that the food at Mamasita would be worth the wait, thoughts echoing through my own mind.  12:30 came and the queue slowly moved forward and up the stairs that led to the dining area.  As we slowly shuffled forward, we wondered how big the restaurant was and if it would fit us all in before we were told that there would be another wait.  Inexorably the queue move forward and all of a sudden we were standing at the top of the stairs and we could see that we would definitely be getting a seat.  Things were looking up.

Cheap Eats - The Mexican Kitchen

http://www.hotelorient.com.au/

Mexican at the Orient, what could possibly go wrong?  Well, plenty when you consider that last venture at the Orient Hotel was a failed steak restaurant called 'Swill'.

The Orient Hotel is one of the last remaining 'ungentrified' hotels left in Brisbane, that is, it hasn't been taken over as a gastro-pub and the yuppies around town have not made it their edgy watering hole (yet).  The Orient Hotel has been around for a long time, in fact it was opened in 1875 and while there have been renovations to the hotel, it still retains much of its old world charm.  You can imagine coming down Ann Street in the early 1900's and not seeing much change from the current Orient Hotel, perhaps there would be not billboards hanging off every building nearby!

I had never been to the Orient before, but had walked by it thousands of times and always wondered who would go to the Orient Hotel nowadays.  I was certainly amused when I first wandered by and saw that a new Steak Restaurant had opened up in the 'old girl' and was not surprised when it closed a short time later....  I mean, who came up with the idea that Swill would be an attractive name for a restaurant?

So, how did I come to be sitting in The Orient on a Friday afternoon waiting for lunch?  It was fairly random when a late change to a team meeting turned into a lunch meeting and we needed somewhere close by.  It was a suggestion from CN and once no one objected, we were booked in for a midday lunch.