Doubleview bar benefits from northern beaches’ pent-up demand
Modern Australian$$
Ever met a happy lawyer? Many want another life. Drummer, lead guitarist, wine producer, carpenter, motorsports champion, novelist: this is the league table of aspirations for law partners who want to consciously uncouple from the grind of finding 27 hours in a day to bill clients.
A couple of years ago, former lawyer Hamish Fleming scratched the itch and without so much as a nihil dicit moved quietly into the world of cocktails and hip bars.
Unlike many legal dreamers, he was good at his second career. He started small with some of Perth’s best bars and the Flipside Burgers group, now scaled back to two shops in North Fremantle and Wembley.
His Northbridge bar, Mechanics Institute, was, probably still is, the super cool barman’s bar with none of the sneer which played host to some of the best drinks and drinks makers in the city.
Fleming and his wife Siobhan also own and operate Mrs Brown bar and Propeller restaurant, which closed this year due to its head chef’s illness, and most recently have acquired a small bar in Doubleview which they’ve called St Brigid Bar.
Doubleview is not a backwater, but culinarily speaking, the prosperous northern suburb is not a hot destination for foodies and drinkers. Down the road at Scarborough, there are lots of middlebrow boozers, takeaway joints and restaurants, some good, none outstanding, so St Brigid benefits from pent-up demand in its neighbourhood.
Here’s what makes it brilliant, in descending order: service, the room, wine and food.
The menu is certainly a bar menu. It’s small and created around dishes easy to eat with a drink and share with a buddy.
Roasted red pepper dip with flatbread was a bright orange paste in a small bowl teamed with a stunner of a properly oily flatbread, made to order. The bread was sprinkled with furikake, a condiment sort of like bonito but with bigger seaweed and salt flavours. The flatbread was pizza-like, puffy and charred and perfect. The roasted red pepper dip was reminiscent of the Spanish romesco sauce. It had great mouthfeel but fell short on flavour. More vinegar, more salt, more oomph please.
Finocchiona with house pickles hit the bullseye. Don’t know where the kitchen sources fennel-seed-flavoured salami, but it’s one of the best we’ve eaten: fatty but not greasy, well seasoned and boldly fermented. The Tuscan salami was sliced in large rounds and plated with a mound of puckeringly sweet bread and butter pickles. Small grissini were provided. Nice.
Whipped feta are two words which strike fear into the hearts of professional eaters. It’s mostly rubbish bar food from rubbish bars. It was a big deal on bar menus two of three years ago and it’s still around: cheap, cheap feta blitzed with cheap other stuff and served with enough bread to hide its imperfections. St Brigid’s version, however, was well made. The feta was good – now there’s a start – the whipping included lots of mint and the well-formed divot was crowned with crunchy marinated (pickled?) zucchini and micro-herbs. It was a stunner to look at and well tasty, but again the flavour lacked amplitude and salt.
Beef skewers were slathered with what they call “roast tahini” which means, I guess, they roast the sesame seeds before turning it into a paste. Whatever they did, the glossy paste was a winner as was a slippery unction of stunning garlic oil and pickled chilli garnish. Beef on skewers often means dried out beef, but these were juicy, tender and rambunctious with flavour.
A fried chicken sandwich was good. The breading on the chicken was properly golden, gnarly and crunchy. The chicken was good, but a little dry and stringy. The burger bun it was wedged between was light and tender to the chew. Lettuce, mayo and pickle garnish was good. The paprika chilli glaze should have been more assertively flavoured. It’s a theme at St Brigid, it lacked seasoning and punch.
To be fair, my complaints about bolder seasoning and flavours are just low-level kvetching, because the food is unequivocally good and stylish and easy to love.
To our mind, the next-loveliest thing about the place is the room. It’s charming and inviting and welcoming. It has good art on the walls. Most bars and restaurants have art on the walls, but you never give them a second look. St Brigid is like a gallery. You find yourself walking the walls taking in the various pieces. The furniture is comfortable and the decor is light and bright, a little bit Scando.
Service is enthusiastic and very good. They’re a great crew. They turn the room into a cool house party just for us.
The booze list is modest in size, with a short list of Pet Nats and a list of whites spanning varieties like trebbiano, riesling, pinot gris, pinot grigio and John Brocksopp’s extraordinary Lillian marsanne roussanne … but just one chardonnay and no chablis. It is clearly a very personal list curated with care. Mocktails are good as is the small selection of “spritzes” ready for summer.
St Brigid is a great local. It fills up with lots of prosperous-looking young locals, families and wine lovers. Go join the party.
The low-down
14.5/20
Cost: all dishes, $11-$36.
Rob Broadfield is WAtoday's Perth food writer and critic. He has had a 30-year career in print, radio and TV journalism, in later years focusing on the dining sector. He was editor of the Good Food Guide, WA's seminal publication on entertainment.