Restaurant review: Two chefs, 10 seats and fabulous food make this pure Joy

There’s often so much palaver around restaurant design and what will most enhance the food and entice the diner to spend up and then return for more. This small-scale passion project in Brisbane, with just two chefs and 10 seats, has nailed it.

Tim and Sarah Scott at their new restaurant Joy in Bakery Lane. Picture: Mark Cranitch

THERE’S usually so much palaver around restaurant design, with lighting, furniture, colour and napery all mulled over at length. What will most enhance the food and entice the diner to spend up and then return for more?

At one end of the continuum, Heston Blumenthal’s English restaurant The Fat Duck has multi-coloured LEDs over each of its tables, the bulbs changing colour as diners progress from night to day during their meal, or there’s Ultraviolet in Shanghai where 10 diners sit around a communal table surrounded by screens and over a 20-course menu are immersed in changing sounds, scents, temperature and visuals.

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You could go down that path or you could just rent a small retail space, build a light grey stone bench facing a kitchen, line it with 10 chairs, and then get someone to spraypaint graffiti on the wall behind. Chefs Tim and Sarah Scott, who chose a shopfront burrowed in at the very end of Bakery Lane in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley for their first restaurant, did just that.

JOY, Shop 7 in Bakery Lane, Fortitude Valley. Picture: AAP Image/Richard Waugh.

This unusual enterprise — a 10-seat chef’s table with the option of either a “short” five-course ($75) or “long” eight-course ($110) menu — is owned and operated by the couple, who both did their apprenticeships in Brisbane before heading for Sydney and the kitchens of fine dining restaurants such as Automata and Sepia.

They run two dinner sittings at six and 8.30pm, and much has to be pre-prepared as the couple also act as sommeliers and waiters to the diners lined up facing the kitchen. Matched drinks are $55 for the short menu and $88 for the long, taken from a clipped drinks list that offers everything by the glass or carafe/bottle.

The five-course menu begins with corn chawanmushi — a take on the Japanese savoury egg custard).

Confit Moreton Bay squid in a coriander and chive dressing, with zucchini puree, and a scattering of fragrant herbs including chervil, dill and tarragon.

The brief repertoire begins with three sakes, including a brown rice version, then a Spanish cava, and moves on to a German riesling and a Brash Higgins cinsault from McLaren Vale.

Diners are all served each course at the same time.

The five-course menu begins with corn chawanmushi (a take on the Japanese savoury egg custard), scattered with toasted quinoa for textural contrast, smoked Yarra Valley caviar, discs of sour pumpkin, and grated dehydrated scallop. It’s a bowl of comforting goodness elevated into fine dining territory.

Next is confit Moreton Bay squid in a coriander and chive dressing, with zucchini puree, and a scattering of fragrant herbs including chervil, dill and tarragon. Every vestige of this vibrant, fresh dish deserves to be eaten, which is why each guest is armed with a seriously delicious warm, buckwheat bread roll for mopping up.

A version of the Italian classic dessert, the Mont Blanc, its peaked profile fashioned from Italian meringue, piped malted artichoke and salted Chantilly.

Next up is a hillock of red cabbage cooked in chicken fat sitting over a smear of horseradish emulsion and studded with pieces of lightly pickled cucumber, crisp chicken skin wafers and topped with finely grated horseradish, while the main course is a slice of black vinegar-glazed Cape Grim short rib that’s been cooked sous vide for 24 hours and teamed with gingered cucumber and salted daikon.

After a refreshing palate cleanser of melon granita with dill and grapes, it’s on to the finale, a version of the Italian classic dessert, the Mont Blanc, its peaked profile fashioned from Italian meringue, piped malted artichoke and salted Chantilly. Small pieces of savoiardi biscuit add crunch.

Chefs Tim and Sarah Scott chose a shopfront burrowed in at the very end of Bakery Lane in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley for their first restaurant. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

Sitting along the bench means the view is of the kitchen. It’s not the world’s most ambient outlook but everything is gleamingly clean and the ingredients are packed away as tidily as if Marie Kondo had been in for a tidy-up.

The couple manages the highwire act of cooking and assembling dishes while serving, with the charming and engaging Sarah doing most of the chit chat and wine delivery. It’s a small-scale passion project that’s on-song: terrific, clever fresh food, off-the-beaten track wines that demand to be tried, and a convivial atmosphere.

JOY

Shop 7, Bakery Lane

694 Ann St, Fortitude Valley

BOOK: joyrestaurant.com.au

OPEN: Wed — Sun, dinner, 6pm and 8.30pm sittings

MUST TRY: Corn chawanmushi

VERDICT

Food 8.5

Ambience 7

Service 8.5

Value 8

OVERALL: 8/10