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 a music school. It’s a beautiful space of tongue-and-groove timber and exposed rafters, its arched windows filling the venue with light during the day.
But it hasn’t come without its challenges. “Oh my god, it’s been challenging,” Riek says. “It was a bit of a battle with Brisbane City Council to get heritage approval, and then everything has to go through a heritage consultant.
It’s a lot of back and forth.” The build will involve, among other things, raising some of the flooring, and installing new plumbing and a grease trap for the kitchen. “The disadvantage is it’s not really set up to be a restaurant,” Riek says, “but the advantage of the heritage space is the looks and the difference.
“The benefit is that the building does quite a lot of the work in terms of the fitout. It’s different immediately without us having to do a huge amount.” Once complete, expect a 60-seat restaurant with a small bar in the corner for walk-in counter dining.
There will also be works by local artists such as Skye Jamieson, Sarah Darling, Holly Anderson and Lizzie Riek (Matilda’s sister). For food, Cooper says he doesn’t want to be locked into any particular cuisine but to expect a mostly European-driven menu with plenty of meat and seafood proteins, plus offal. Draft dishes include a mud-crab omelette Arnold Bennett; confit ocean trout with cocktail potato, watercress and caviar sauce; a lamb saddle chop with a bagnetta (piquillo pepper, anchovy and parsley) sauce; and butterflied blue mackerel with pickled tomato and a mussel vinaigrette.
“I’m not going to bang on about seasonal produce,” he says. “That’s our job, to work with the seasons. But I’ll want to change it up pretty frequently, keeping it quite classic, but also approachable.
” Riek says drinks will involve a short wine list – between 30 and 50 bottles that mix local and international drops – and a clutch of classic, simple cocktails and mixed drinks that will include a Negroni, a Campari and soda, and a spritz. “Like the food, it’s meant to be quite simple and very classic,” she says. The couple also want to do Sunday lunch and make the restaurant available for weddings and private events.
“It’s a mixture of [excitement and trepidation] at the moment,” Riek says. “I’m a bit slow like that,” Cooper says. “We’re just go, go, go, and I don’t think this will all sink in until we’re operating.
” August will open at 19 Dornoch Terrace in mid-November. Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox. You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
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