Casual Dining - La Via the South Bank pizzeria

http://lavia.com.au/

There had been all sorts of excitement.  We'd just bought a snazzy new apartment in the city, well, a new apartment in our building, and had been busy cleaning up our place to start to show prospective purchasers through.  It's a pretty nervous time, you want people to love your place enough to want to buy it.  Being pretty lazy, our plan had been to hire in some cleaners to completely spruce up the place before it formerly went on the market, a plan that went off without a hitch.  We were pretty wiped out from a day of keeping busy while the cleaners went to work, so unsurprisingly, we decided on dinner out.

Being a last minute thing, I'd wanted to go somewhere easy for dinner, but I also had an almost zealot like desire for pizza, so we needed to find a place that did decent pizza.  South Bank is not normally a location that you'd normally associate with great pizza, but I seemed to remember walking past a restaurant in Little Stanley Street that did pizza.  I really couldn't recall it's name, so took to the interwebs to see if I could find it and make a booking.  You've really gotta love Google, it doesn't take much to find anything these days, and before I knew it, our table was secured and we were on our way.

It was a pretty nice day, so we decided to walk over to South Bank.  While we wandered over, we reflected on the hit and miss nature of the restaurants at South Bank.  Our conclusion was that with so many restaurants, and being so busy most of the time, it was hard to have a consistent service and we'd just had some crappy experiences.  I also wondered if the high level of walk in traffic mean that restaurants didn't have to worry about repeat business and therefore didn't always focus in on the little things.  All completely speculative, of course.

La Via was much further down Little Stanley Street than I remembered it being, so far down in fact it was right by the 5th Element (see post here).  We'd arrived about thirty minutes before our reservation time, hoping to get in a little earlier.  The little Italian restaurant was completely packed and we wondered if there would be a little bit of a wait before we were seated.  We were in luck, and were seated early in probably the only two seats left in the whole dining area.

Casual Dining - Red Hook American Street Food

https://www.facebook.com/redhookbrisbane/info

I'm wondering if Brisbane was somehow annexed as the 52nd State of the United States, as with the amount of US style dining options now available, it's certainly starting to feel like it.  Be it a burger, a hot dog or southern style cooking, there now seems to be an endless array of American dining.  While this is not necessarily a new thing, think about the McDonalds invasion in the 80's and then Subway in the late 90's, it is definitely entered our dining consciousness like never before.

One of the coolest restaurants around, and one of my favourites, is Public down at George Street (see post here). Bonnie Shearston and Tom Sanceau, the team behind what was voted the best new restaurant a few years ago, have kicked off another venture that is a little more casual than Public.  Located in Gresham Lane, Red Hook Brisbane is the latest restaurant to fly the United States banner, this time with down to earth New York style street food.  

Gresham Lane is home to some of Brisbane's busiest lunchtime destinations and Red Hook has taken the last vacant space to be developed, at the site where it was once rumoured that Melbourne's Taxi would set up shop.  With the addition of Red Hook, the lane has quietly gone from lunchtime mecca spot to showing hints that a thriving night time trade could one day reign supreme.  Along with the Gresham whisky bar, Red Hook is open for extended hours, and has been doing a pretty decent dinner trade as well as a pretty manic lunch.

Breakfast Series - WickEd Cafe

WickEd Cafe Spring Hill

All day breakfast.....  It kind of has a luxurious feel about it.  It's a bold statement saying 'you don't need to rush, you can just take your time'.  I don't know about you, but I am a big fan of the all day breakfast, I love bacon and eggs on toast for lunch. It had been some time since I'd taken the time out to do breakfast at lunch, but it was something that I used to do quite often.

I'd been heading back to work after visiting my surgeon for a post shoulder operation check up and happened to be walking down Wickham Terrace on the Spring Hill / CBD border when I spied a sign announcing 'all day breakfast'.  I'd actually walked past WickEd in Spring Hill heaps of times and had wondered what the little cafe at the bottom of Observatory Tower was like.  It wasn't until I had walked completely past WickEd that it registered that the all day breakfast included chorizo, but once it did register, I found myself on auto pilot walking back up the street and into the cafe.

While I had never set foot in WickEd before, the name has always been a source of amusement for me, it's a pretty cool name, if not a little over used, but given the cafe is on the corner of Wickham Terrance and Edward Street, it kind of works.  I was surprised by how little the cafe was inside, there was room for a counter and kitchen, as well as a few seats with most of the seating outside, under a huge sun umbrella.

Cheap Eats - La Rotisserie at the Gasworks

http://www.larotisserie.com.au/

We were wandering around the Valley and its surrounds looking at furniture a couple of weekends ago, which can be really quite draining. We're moving apartments really soon and want to have a fresh new look in our fresh new apartment!  After a couple of hours of getting in and out of chairs, measuring spaces in our heads and slowly going insane with the options and possibilities, we decided to give it up for the day and head to the Standard Markets to grab some groceries before going home to chill out. Normally, we'd head over to the Valley Standard but since we were closer to the Gasworks, we checked out the Standard there instead.

I digress, this post isn't about our shopping habits or the Standard.  We were feeling quite hungry from our furniture shopping and wanted something to eat and with a heap of options at the Gasworks, we were spoilt for choice.  We stood in a central spot and turned full circle trying to decide where to grab a bite to eat, with a flash of red catching my eye and a fragment of a memory coming to the fore. Ahhh, that was right, La Rotisserie was at the Gasworks and a sudden desire for chicken and chips struck me.

I'd known that La Rotisserie had opened at Gasworks and had previously resolved to check it out, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity.  As we walked through the front door of the very Parisian looking little restaurant, I was reminded of some of the best chicken that we'd eaten on our trip to Paris a few years prior.  Chicken is something that the French take great pride in doing well and even at little market stalls, the rotisserie chicken is a cut above what we'd experienced in Brisbane.  You only need to think about perhaps the most famous of all French chickens, the Bresse, to know how serious the French are about their fowl.