Restaurant review: The Wolfe of eat street

YOU know you’ve found a winner when the restaurant staff are so good that they convince you to tuck into something you’d usually baulk at. Calf’s liver with black pudding crumb, anyone?

Owner and chef Paul McGivern of The Wolfe in East Brisbane posing at his restaurant, Brisbane 15th December 2017. The Wolfe has been voted number 1 in the Delicious 100 people's choice awards. (AAP Image/Josh Woning)

• The Wolfe comes out on top
• Queensland’s top 100 restaurants

FINDING great service in Brisbane is hard — like doing pull-ups when you have no upper body strength and the only weight training you’ve done is lifting blocks of cheese to your mouth.

So when you get standout service in this city, it makes its mark.

Bailee Dewes at The Wolfe in East Brisbane made her mark on me.

The Wolfe restaurant won the people’s choice award in the Delicious 100. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

Dewes is passionate about her job, charming, engaging and most importantly, informed.

She knows the restaurant’s menu and wine list inside out and makes recommendations with such fervour you’re even tempted to try things you’d never normally eat — hence my guest eating the entree of calf’s liver with walnut and black pudding crumb.

Her faultless service meant our party of six immediately felt comfortable and at ease, was never left wanting for anything and she even surprised the birthday girl with an unexpected plate of mini lemon meringue pies engraved with “Happy Birthday” in chocolate at the end of our meal after I’d casually mentioned on arrival it was a friend’s celebration.

Even if the food had been average, I’d go back just to be taken care of by Dewes, who even though is a stranger, makes you feel like a friend.

Thankfully, though, the food is far from average. In fact, the restaurant was voted number 1 in the Delicious 100 people's choice awards.

Chef/owner Paul McGivern delivers a tight but eclectic and enticing menu with entrees such as ocean trout with beetroot, tofu and macadamia milk to mains such as lamb two ways with warrigal greens, smoked curd and mint.

The tasting menu offers terrific value for money at just $90 for six courses (plus $55 for matching wines), but for those looking to keep it light, start perhaps with the oysters ($4.50 each). From the Central Coast during my visit, they were plump and bursting with the flavours of the sea and served with a simple eschalot dressing.

You’ll want to lick the plate clean when ordering the smoked duck breast.

For main course, Dewes’ ardent sell had almost all of us ordering the duck ($39) — a gently smoked breast, blushing pink inside, with pops of the native cranberry fruit muntries for brightness, a just-sweet jus you wanted to lick the plate over, and a crisp, glass-like shard of compressed potato on top. Delicious.

There are just three desserts, plus a special, and it was the vacherin with passionfruit and lemon curd ice cream ($16) that had the table gushing with delight at its harmony of sweet and tart and luscious textures.

The Wolfe has a relaxed, suburban setting of a cosy, renovated old cottage. Picture: Mark Cranitch

It’s all clever, fine dining food but in the relaxed, suburban setting of a cosy, renovated old cottage with a heavy walnut bar against white VJ walls and modern furniture in varying tones of grey. There’s also a cute — albeit a little chilly in winter — courtyard out the back, heated by braziers.

My only regret of the night was that I was driving and couldn’t indulge in more wine from their thoughtful and diverse list of old and new world offerings. There’s also an appealing array of gins and whiskies if you’re in for something a little harder.

With terrific operators like McGivern and Dewes at the helm, The Wolfe ticks all the boxes.

VERDICT

Food 8

Service 10

Ambience 8 Value 8

OVERALL 8.5