‘Forget Tinder, this is the ultimate bloke buffet’

If you’re a single lady looking for love this festive season, we may have just discovered the best place to find it – and the food and drinks are pretty good there too.

Anooska Tucker-Evans

2 min read

December 16, 2022 - 12:00AM

QWeekend

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To the single ladies of Brisbane, forget Tinder, Bumble or Hinge to meet your prospective love match – I’ve found the ultimate bloke buffet with a gent for every taste.

On a Saturday night, the newly opened BrewDog in Fortitude Valley is a smorgasbord of men, with three storeys of this industrial chic taphouse heaving with fellas.

BrewDog in Fortitude Valley. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

On the ground floor you can connect over an arcade game, with machines alongside rows of long communal tables. Or perhaps get to know a potential suitor by challenging them to a game of shuffleboard on the top floor. Or, if it’s intimate conversation you’re chasing, then there’s a comfy couch or leather booths on the basement level, opposite a long, timber-lined bar.

Obviously, I jest, and you certainly don’t have to be looking for love to enjoy this freshly launched sister venue to the Scottish-born brand’s hugely popular Murarrie craft brewery in Brisbane’s east. As well as all the blokes on my visit there are plenty of ladies, with the slick operation clearly a hit with groups of friends.

The ground floor bar at BrewDog in Fortitude Valley. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

While Murarrie might be slightly more family focused, the Valley outlet is for the adults: loud, fun and unpretentiously cool. What both sites have in common, of course, is their dedication to beer.

Each level of the Valley behemoth features a bar, with 20 taps pouring in-house brews and specialty ranges made by collaborating with other local breweries.

From the latter we try the Professor and Mary Ann coconut cream pie sour (4 per cent alcohol, $12) made in conjunction with West End’s Parched Craft Brewery. It boasts bright and refreshing lime tartness, with more coconut than a Bounty Bar. While the lighter in-house Passionfruit Blitz (3.5 per cent, $10) delivers face-sucking sourness, with hits of lemon, passionfruit and apple.

It’s just the kind of palate cleansing you want to accompany what the brewery describes as “farm-to-table junk food”.

The heritage tomato salad. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

What that actually translates to is a broad-ranging menu that moves from pub classics like burgers and wings to healthier options, such as salads and baba ganoush with handmade flat bread, with about a third of the dishes gluten-free, vegan or vegetarian. Of the 10 burgers available (all served with chips), the Patriot ($23.95) is the most popular, combining beef, cheese, smoked bacon, pickles, onion, lettuce and barbecue sauce on a seeded bun. It’s an absolute monster, with the eye-twitchingly tart pickles dominating each mouthful.

The Patriot burger. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

Portion sizes run large here and are very well priced given the immense sizes, with the heritage tomato and baby mozzarella salad ($24.95) arguably enough to feed four. It’s also delicious, combining soft strips of roasted red capsicum, shallots, tomatoes, sunflower seeds and harissa-roasted chickpeas in a bright vinegary honey and mustard dressing. Just as generous and also with plenty of vinegary tang are the Korean loaded fries ($17.95), starring the venue’s signature skin-on potato chips topped with sriracha mayonnaise, pickled red onion and chunks of sweet and crispy fried chicken.

The King of pigs pizza. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

What has my companion in complete raptures, though, is the King of Pigs pizza ($23.95, gluten free also available). Layered with wafer-thin slices of the fennel-flavoured Italian salami finocchiona, mozzarella, leek and watercress, with a bitey tomato sugo on a fiercely flame-licked, wood-fired base, it could give any great Italian restaurant a run for its money.

While BrewDog heroes beer, its food line-up is just as hungry for a slice of the spotlight, easily up there with some of the great gastropubs.