At $58, is this Brisbane’s most expensive steak sandwich?

Even if the $58 price tag on the steak sandwich doesn’t make you blink, one aspect of the delivery at this high-end Brisbane restaurant may prompt a double-take.

Alison Walsh

@AlisonAWalsh

2 min read

October 7, 2021 - 4:38PM

QWeekend

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Can a steak sandwich really cost $58? Yes, if you go to new South Brisbane Japanese restaurant Takashiya. The breathtaking price comes courtesy of premium ingredients: wagyu tenderloin from leading NSW producer Jack’s Creek and milk bread flown in from Japan. The sandwich arrives in quarters, each chunk of downy white bread encasing a piece of lightly crumbed, furiously blushing beef, with a smear of yuzu pepper sauce and a little shredded cabbage. The meat is so soft and tender you could eat it even if you left your dentures at home. A small salad comes in a lidded glass bowl on the side.

There’s no doubt it’s delicious but the “sando” is so extravagant that focus falls on its not overly large size and whether the bread would have been more ethereal if made locally without the international transit time.

Wagyu beef sandwich at Takashiya Bar

Takashiya is down a set of stairs near the entrance to Emporium Hotel at South Bank, with the horseshoe-shaped Cherry Blossom Bar at the front for drinks (including sake and Japanese whisky tasting flights) and casual dining.

Behind it is a dining room where chef Takashi Nami prepares a $230 per head omakase (“I’ll leave it up to you”) menu for up to 12 diners seated before him. This experience appears to be an evolution of the chef’s 2019 opening, Shishou, a 14-seat luxury sushi degustation in Fortitude Valley. There, he curated premium ingredients into a dazzling sequence of sashimi, sushi, seafood miso soup and dessert.

Takashiya Bar, South Brisbane.

But we’re not out the back with chef Nami, we’re at Takashiya’s bar, where the ceiling is dripping with a pretty field of pink faux flowers, perched on grey chairs that are a bit too low for the bench height.

Serviettes are paper and the drinks list is laminated, with pictures of sake and whisky bottles. The wine list is a brief 11 bottles, including a $1499 Grange (no vintage is given), with five available by the glass including a chablis for $15 and a Henschke Keyneton Euphonium for $29.

Kagoshima A5 wagyu and Foie Gras Aburi Nigiri at Takashiya in South Brisbane.

The “casual dining menu” has sashimi, three offerings from the omakase experience menu including an oyster shooter for $25, the steak sandwich and a $48 Glacier 51 toothfish version, five vegetable dishes, a duck breast salad, and two rice dishes including roasted duck and foie gras fried rice for $42. Perhaps a couple of cheaper options would help broaden the menu’s appeal to drinkers?

We order a number of dishes and they arrive in quick succession beginning with negitoro cones (two for $10), with the crunchy casing an appealing contrast to the soft filling of diced tuna. We share a single nigiri ($18), the submarine-shaped rice mound topped with the thinnest slivers of gorgeous, highly marbled, imported Kagoshima A5 wagyu and finished with a thin disc of flame-torched foie gras. It’s a wonderful match of flavours.

Fried sweet corn with yuzu aioli at Takashiya Bar in South Brisbane.

Next to arrive are strips of fried chunks of sweet corn with yuzu aioli ($12) and miso-flavoured eggplant ($14), both of which are plain, pleasant and nicely cooked. A small fillet of succulent, high-fat Glacier 51 toothfish ($24), also cooked in miso, follows, and then the wagyu sandwich, with personable staff explaining the dishes.

Seared aged duck breast salad at Takashiya Bar.

If money is no object and you have a hankering for a luxury Japanese degustation starring world-class produce then maybe the omakase menu may suit best.

But at the bar, the laminated drinks list, small paper napkins and casual ambience are an odd match with such a determinedly premium menu.