How to cheat your way to a seat at Brisbane restaurant Agnes
It’s new, all the cooking is over fire and it takes weeks to get a reservation. What’s the secret to actually getting inside for a taste of the action?
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A former inner-city warehouse-turned restaurant, where the menu is prepared with fire or smoke, is Brisbane’s most in-demand eatery.
Agnes, which opened on August 11 in a nondescript building in a nondescript street on the Spring Hill side of Brunswick Street, is booked solid for weeks.
By late on opening day, the first booking I could get was six weeks later.
The restaurant, seating 50 at a time with current COVID-19 restrictions, has had a lengthy gestation. Former Gerard’s chef Ben Williamson last year teamed up with restaurateurs Ty Simon, Bianca Marchi and Frank Li, who also run the Valley’s sAme sAme and Honto, to get the project underway.
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But after protracted approval and building issues, COVID hit and Agnes opened as a bakery, which was a pandemic smash hit and put the place on the radar.
Agnes’s bar, which has a snack menu as well as an exhaustive drinks list, is walk-in only, allowing punters a sneak peek of the action.
We arrive at 5.30pm on a weekday, and there’s already a knot of people loitering out the front. While most of them are there for the restaurant, which offers the likes of clams with kipfler potato, onion butter and daikon leaf or smoked lamb neck with ancho mole and flatbread, we’re directed past the dining area with its communal tables, charcoal pits and a wood-fired oven, and down the stairs to the bar. Here, the paint is so distressed it’s practically begging for mercy, wide wooden floorboards taper off into the gloaming, racks of bottles climb the walls and there’s a comfy banquette and stools. And, as someone who looks her best in pitch black, I love the sultry low lighting.
Wait staff are attentive and informative in a relaxed, pleasant way and after we’re COVID checked in, we’re soon sipping on cocktails, the best my “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans” ($20), a terrific brew of tequila, pear liqueur, caramelised pear, cinnamon and lime.
The inventive snack menu, also available in the restaurant, begins sedately with malted sourdough ($3), a bestseller from Agnes’s bakery days and it’s damn good, arriving with a pat of butter so cultured it’s speaking with an Old Etonian accent and so smoky you swear it had just been plucked from a fireplace.
We pass up oysters and house charcuterie, and opt for grilled parson’s noses threaded on skewers, their richness partly offset by garlic cream and pickles ($8). Similarly big flavoured is the bonito, white nduja and white strawberry sandwich ($8). After a couple of bites the fish overwhelms the other fine ingredients; it’s a bit like Ricky Gervais, amazing but grating.
We’re in heaven with, of all things, a plate of radishes with perky leaves attached to signal just-picked status. They’re perched in a pool of onion sour cream, like French onion dip, only better, with a drizzle of honey and a dusting of mushroom salt ($10) and are absolutely terrific.
Rivalling them for wow factor are the tiny prawn doughnuts ($7 each). Given scarlet prawns are among the world’s most coveted, the price may be warranted but the doughnuts are so small it’s difficult to properly savour the flavours before they’re finished. One is not enough: cheaper prawns and a bigger doughnut might ultimately be better. Lamb ribs ($14) are slathered in sesame whey caramel, and they’re soft, succulent, fatty, delicious batons that might possibly act as giant alcohol super soakers.
All the restaurant’s desserts are available in the bar and we opt for strawberry mille-feuille ($15), a really lovely finale.
A visit to Agnes’s bar is only an aperitif to the restaurant experience, but it’s absolutely worth a visit in its own right.