Portside classic reborn with a new look – and new menu
From the creators of Donna Chang comes this beautifully revised restaurant, which also features a killer signature cocktail list and Lebanese wines. Take a look.
Two coffee machines. Three milk jugs. Maybe 50 orders at any one time.
Plenty of locals won’t remember Chez Laila, but just as many will. Parked down the end of South Bank on the boardwalk in the mid-1990s, it used to pump on weekends, with families and couples piling in for coffee, cake and comfort food inspired by owner Antoine Ghanem’s native Lebanon.
Vianna Joseph remembers. She remembers working those two coffee machines and three milk jugs. She remembers her cousin, Nehme Ghanem – Antoine and wife and Chez Laila co-owner Adrienne’s son – working alongside her.
“Nehme and I were guns on the machine,” Joseph says. “We were just teenagers. We’d get angry if you ordered anything other than dairy or soy milk, and the coffees were probably dreadful by today’s standards. But we were good at it.”
Now, Joseph is back by the river, only at Portside, not South Bank. And she and Nehme Ghanem are still good at this. Nehme and his brother Adonis are directors of Ghanem Group; Joseph is the company’s CEO.
Ghanem Group has been on a tear these past six years, opening Donna Chang in the CBD in 2018, Iris and Bisou Bisou at Hotel X in 2021, and Luc Lac late last month at Queen’s Wharf. Before that, there was Blackbird in the CBD in 2014 – and before that, there was Byblos, which opened at Portside in 2005.
Named for the ancient, coastal city of Byblos, it was a flash party place for Brisbane’s bright young things back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. But it was also the spiritual home of Ghanem Group, remaining so even as the company opened newer and more sophisticated venues.
So the question for the Ghanems was how to update a venue that had so much meaning for the family.
“You’re not doing something from scratch,” Joseph says. “You’re reinventing something that’s close to us. Everyone is so passionate about this restaurant. Everyone gets that ability to feed into it because everyone feels that it is something that represents them.”
Byblos reopened earlier this month and is a restaurant transformed. Gone is the dark and flashy treatment of the old venue, replaced instead by light, bright interior that better communes with the river outside. It’s all arched travertine features, marble surfaces and subtle lighting. It’s both restrained and inviting, and feels much more of a piece with the rest of the Ghanem venues.
“We wanted to modernise the space,” Joseph says. “It needed that and deserved that.
“We gave [regular Ghanem designers] Space Cubed a really clear brief and they did such a good job and brought so much of it to life … We wanted to weave in a lot of the inspiration from our travels.”
Last year, Joseph travelled with Nehme, Adonis and group executive chef Jake Nicolson to Lebanon for two weeks of in-depth research. The result is not just a transformed venue but a transformed menu, which explores Levantine cuisine in much higher fidelity than previously.
For staters, you might order cold and hot mezat such as labneh bi zeit (handmade cheese rolled in za’atar, chilli and pistachio), fried eggplant fatteh with cow’s milk tahini yoghurt sauce, fresh mint and toasted flatbread; or Lebanese spiced pork and lamb sausages with lemon and butter.
From the grill there’s butterflied quail with orange blossom honey, black tiger prawn skewers with chilli shatta butter, lamb kofta with a tahini sauce, and lahim meshwi beef skewers with a wild thyme chimichurri.
Larger plates to share include roasted cauliflower with spiced butter, toasted walnuts and soft herbs, slow-cooked lamb shoulder with Lebanese lamb rice, mixed fruit and nuts, and Ora King salmon tarator (baked salmon spiked with tahini and walnuts).
“We went to some amazing restaurants and eateries when in Lebanon,” Joseph says. “So we took a lot of inspiration from that. The idea was to bring more of Lebanon to Brisbane.”
Drinks remain cocktail-forward, with group beverage director Aaron Clark creating an imaginative list of signatures such as the Phoenician Sunset (Licor 43, strawberry liqueur, apple, strawberry), the Port in the Storm (Dark rum, tawny port, ras el hanout falernum, lime, Fever Tree ginger beer) and the terracotta-rested Amphorian (The Botanist gin, Aperol, apricot, Suze bitters, Mancino Bianco vermouth). There’s also a trio of shared cocktails and Arak, a triple-distilled drink made from Lebanese grapes and flavoured with aniseed.
There’s also a relatively focused wine list of around 100 bottles that includes plenty of champagne and sparkling, and wines by the glass, plus a clutch of drops from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
“I used to come back to Brisbane to visit [after an extended period living and working in London] and it shocked me how advanced the city’s dining had become,” Joseph says. “The one thing I try to drum into our team is that if you’re in Brisbane, you’re spoilt for choice.
“We’ve got to reward that choice when people come to us. We can’t be just OK. We can’t just be really good. We’ve got to be exceptional to compete.”
Open Tue-Sat 11.30am-late
Portside Wharf, 39 Hercules Street, Hamilton, (07) 3268 1998
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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.