‘The food is delicious, well-prepared and beautifully presented. But as street food goes, it’s tame. Way too tame.’

Street food is a favourite for food critic Tony Harper, so he went with high expectations to Fish Lane’s Chu The Fat. Did it live up to his hopes?

Chu the Phat, Fish Lane, South Brisbane.

Asian street food is probably my favourite genre of the lot: skewered giblets, banh mi, bun cha, stink beans, kway teow, curries, roti, laksa, dumpling and buns, cooked and served from trolleys and carts, bicycles and lean-tos. It’s a broad collection crossing borders, religions and ideologies but bound together by accessibility and affordability.

And Asian street food is what Chu the Phat claims as its speciality.

It inhabits two floors that straddle Fish Lane and Melbourne St in South Brisbane: restaurant upstairs and bar below. Its feel is vaguely colonial-Asian: quite contemporary and comfy, with Asian bric-a-brac here and there. The Melbourne St wall is all glass … nice.

Like Madame Wu, its Eagle St sibling, Chu the Phat doesn’t commit to its chosen genre.

Instead it aims for a broad-appeal, airbrushed experience: safe and polished.

Take the drinks for example: champagne, prosecco and Australian sparkling; a few rieslings, a mass of sauvignon blanc, pinot gris, chardonnays and (hallelujah) one gewurztraminer and one vermentino; pinot noirs, cabernets, a lone merlot and a bunch of shirazes.

It’s an OK list but it’s generic, mostly from big companies, unrelated to the food style and interchangeable with 50 other lists in our various steak, mod-Oz and fish restaurants. Where are the gruner and the kabinett? Where are the racy white blends from Tasmania or the more decadent whites from Alsace that pair so well with Asian cuisine?

Ditto the beers: Peroni, Fat Yak, Great Northern, Corona … saved, just, by Tsingtao, Asahi Black and Chang (which is a little like an Australian-themed restaurant representing our beer culture with VB and XXXX).

The kitchen treads a better but similarly wide, safe path.

The food is delicious, well-prepared and beautifully presented. But as street food goes, it’s tame. Way too tame.

Trout fritters ($12) come with a small bowl of chilli and black vinegar. They are good, vaguely Asian fritters; the sauce provides the sizzle but we need triple the amount. Smoked beef tongue, celery, poached egg and black garlic ($18) is marvellous — the star of our lunch. The thing is, it doesn’t really yell Japanese, or Korean, or Thai, or Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian or anything else.

It’s a terrific dish … anonymous lineage.

White cut chicken, a Cantonese classic, and definitively restaurant rather than street food — has been reinterpreted, tumbled into a chicken-salad arrangement with watercress, cucumber and sesame seeds ($17), the chicken rough-diced. There’s a drizzle of chilli oil which prompts me to get a couple of bowls of chilli to light a fire under everything else on the table.

It’s enjoyable food, in some instances seriously good, but it doesn’t really have the raw energy that makes Asian street food so damned appealing.

I have a hunch it’s intentional: a big restaurant, broad brushstrokes.

So perhaps it’s merely a case of mislabelling modern Asian cuisine?