Former Bar Francine chef Brad Cooper is teaming up with his partner to create August, an intimate, Euro-focused diner on a leafy West End terrace. August 21, 2024 You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more.
Save this article for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. It’s probably about time Brad Cooper had his own restaurant. Cooper turned plenty of heads with his cooking at Bar Francine, the brilliant little West End eatery owned by Adrienne Jory and Rick Gibson.
Before that – with a break from the industry in between – he was at Florence in Camp Hill, where he helped make that one of the city’s go-to brunch spots. In short, over the past five years he’s earned a reputation as one of this city’s best young chefs. Now he and partner Matilda Riek are set to open a new restaurant, August, in November.
“We’ve talked about it jokingly for a long time,” Cooper says, “then towards the end of Francine [in March], we just thought, ‘f---, maybe we should do this’, and had a few conversations and really dove in. But we’d probably been looking at it properly for a solid year.” Diving in sounds about right.
After looking at spaces across the city, the pair settled on a heritage-listed church on leafy Dornoch Terrace in West End. Originally a Methodist church built in 1888, the building was moved to its current location in 1914 and was more recently a musical theatre and then.