Mackay’s best local businesses of 2021 revealed

From where to eat incredible pizza to the best salon to have your hair done and tattooist to ink your skin, this is ultimate list of the Best of Mackay winners for the year – voted by you.

Tara Miko and Lillian Watkins

5 min read

December 30, 2021 - 5:00AM

Business

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From where to get the best bakery goods to the best hairdresser to freshen up your look and Mackay’s best bartender, this is the ultimate list of the winners from our Best of Mackay series this year - voted by you.

Best brunch - Y.A.W Food

Brandan and Billy Tranberg of Yaw. Photo: Daryl Wright

Best brunch is a hotly-contested category in any town but Mackay’s new kids on the block have secured the title in the Daily Mercury’s 2021 poll.The winner of Matt Preston’s Best Brunch in Mackay is Y.A.W Food on the corner of Gregory and Alfred streets.

Brandan and Billy Tranberg opened Y.A.W Food just over eight months ago and said the support from the region had been amazing.

“Being a new business, you put in a lot of hard work to try and establish yourself in the community,” Brandon said.

“To be recognised among some of the best cafes and restaurants in town, it’s a great feeling.”

Kylie Edwards, Ron Dawson and Amanda Kennedy are the siblings behind Alcorn Bakery's success. Picture: Lillian Watkins

A good vanilla slice is akin to a slice of heaven and these bakers know it.

Alcorn Bakery in Andergrove rose above the rest, taking out the top spot in Matt Preston’s search for the Best Bakery in Mackay.

Running the bakery is a family affair with the matriarch Joyce Dawson offering more than 50 years of experience to the art.

But Joyce’s son Ron Dawson now heads the back room and her daughters Kylie Edwards and Amanda Kennedy captain the front of shop.

Tri Tone Tattoo owner and tattooist Mitchell Brammer working on a realism horror piece for Mitchell Norton. Picture: Heidi Petith

What’s better than being voted into the number one spot for best tattooist in town? Sharing it with your mate.

Mackay’s Best Tattooist competition was taken out with a draw between Tri Tone Tattoo Mitchell Brammer and Maiden Ink’s Benny Morgan.

Mr Brammer said he was “stoked” to win the competition and sharing the top position with his mate Mr Morgan just made it that much sweeter.

Sorbellos head chef Riccardo Veneziani holds a freshly made spicy pepperoni pizza, which is one of the venues most popular pizzas. Sorbellos was voted by Mackay as having the best pizzas in town.

When Matt Preston put the call out for Mackay’s best pizza joint the region answered and the votes flooded in.

The hardworking team at Sorbellos Italian Restaurant create up to 800 pizzas each week, so it’s no wonder the venue was named as having the best slice in Mackay.

Italian-born head chef Riccardo Veneziani attributed it to quality produce, making everything from scratch and an even ratio of ingredients.

Sorbellos has been a stalwart on the Mackay dining scene for the past 25 years, and from the quality ingredients and attention to detail that goes into each dish it’s easy to see why it remains one of the region’s most popular restaurants.

Best Hairdresser winner Tina Llewellyn at her Mackay salon Hair Asylum. Picture: Lillian Watkins

Tina Llewellyn is a self-professed “people person”.

Combine that with her passion to keeping things interesting and voila, you have Mackay’s best hairdresser.

Mrs Llewellyn said the secret was to never assume you knew what a client wanted.

“You have to always offer a change, you can’t just get in a bad habit of mixing up someone’s colour before you have a chat with them,” she said.

“You never know what someone is feeling.”

But the gravity of a bad hair day is not lost on Mrs Llewellyn who uses her 27 years of hairdresser intuition to ensure her clients are ready for those big shake-ups.

The Dispensary Coffee Kitchen Bar co-owners Adrian Connors and Damien Connors. The brothers, along with their mum Lyn Connors, are behind the cafe named Mackay's best for 2021. Picture: Tara Miko

A dispensary, by definition, is where the medicine is provided and delivered to cure what ails you.

For Mackay, The Dispensary Coffee Kitchen Bar is exactly that, but so much more.

A mainstay in Mackay’s growing cafe culture and dining scene is the daily deliverer of the morning tonic needed to get through the day and has been voted the city’s best cafe.

It’s a humbling honour for co-owners Adrian and Damien Connors who, along with mum Lyn Connors, have grown The Dispensary into a flourishing cafe that consistently offers up the right goods, be that drinks, food or atmosphere.

They romped in the win against a highly competitive field of cafes around Mackay.

Michelle Clews has been a bartender at the Black's Beach Tavern since 2008 and has just taken out the Daily Mercury's Best Bartender competition. Picture: Lillian Watkins

The winner of the Best Bartender competition draws patrons into Blacks Beach Tavern with her infectious enthusiasm and her mastership of the iconic cocktail, the backhanded panda.

“I get told when people walk through the door they hear my laugh and it puts a smile on their face,” Michelle Clews said.

Mrs Clews was initially on track to work in childcare but that was pushed to the side when she fell in love with the timeless trade of bartending.

When she left school, her parents helped her get a job doing work experience at a pub in her hometown of Scotts Head in New South Wales.

Theatre Arts Mackay Excellence and Mackay's Best Coach winner Leigh Cairns. Picture: Lillian Watkins

A Mackay teacher has left traditional and dangerous norms behind, opening the doors to everyone for a chance to dance.

And it is this attitude and aptitude that makes Leigh Cairns voted Mackay’s Best Coach.

Mrs Cairns said years ago, if a child didn’t have the correct structural make up such as a ‘hip turnout’, they were dismissed from the dance world.

Jackson's Takeaway owner Jess Jackson-Gee, winner of the Best of Burgers competition in Mackay. Picture: Lillian Watkins

The winner of the Matt Preston’s Best Burger competition went from serving schoolchildren comfort food to dishing up Mackay’s best burgers.

Jess Jackson-Gee and Michael Gee are, as voted by you, the very best in the art of burger-making.

The former Joseph’s Catholic Primary School tuckshop woman and her husband started Jackson’s Takeaway 18 months ago, naming it in tribute of her father, Stephen Jackson.

“My dad passed away when I was 25, he was on the other side of Australia so I didn’t get to see him or go to his funeral,” Mrs Jackson-Gee said.

She said her father took his own life 18 years ago.

“I miss him, but this place brings him here everyday,” Mrs Jackson-Gee said.

“I don’t think I could do it without him.”

Cosmetic Injector Heidi Eastcott doing what she loves best.

When Mackay’s Best Cosmetic Injector Heidi Eastcott first came to Mackay, she was a single mother of two children with $1600 to her name.

Ms Eastcott had just finished her second bachelor’s degree in Complementary Medicine while she worked as a cosmetic injector for a clinic in Cairns.

She made the move to Mackay for a fresh start, but without the finances to back herself, said she had no intention of opening her own clinic.

But after doing some work on a friend, she was encouraged to consider it — and like magic a perfect studio with “lots of foot traffic” opened up in the rental market, with the agent offering her two months free.

“I put a sign out the front and prayed,” Ms Eastcott said.