‘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.
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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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
BREWDOG FORTITUDE VALLEY
235 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
brewdog.com/au/brisbane-fortitude-valley
Kitchen open Sun-Thu 11am-9pm; Fri-Sat 11am-10pm
Verdict – Scores out of 5
Food 4
Service 3.5
Ambience 4.5
Value 4
Overall 4
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