First look: Happy Boy team unveils Petite, its long-awaited French eatery
This striking two-level restaurant, with its enormous windows, slick fit-out, approachable food and killer collection of Gallic wine, might be the Votan brothers best yet. Take a peek inside.
Cameron Votan likens looking into Petite to peering inside a dollhouse. Standing on the corner of East and Ann Streets, you see what he means.
Votan’s strikingly minimal, French-inspired restaurant is blessed with generous, two-storey floor-to-ceiling windows that allow passers-by to take in everything at a glance: Aubrey Courtel and his chef brigade working at their low-set benches; diners lined at its counter illuminated by the light of the wine fridges, and up top on its expansive mezzanine; the enormous vintage, modernist chandeliers imported from Como in Italy.
It’s a restaurant that communes with the street outside – the lights of the traffic reflecting off its concrete pillars and ribbed leather banquettes – despite it lacking the al fresco dining elements of neighbouring Happy Boy and Snack Man, also owned by Votan and his brother Jordan Votan.
“It’s an amalgam of the best parts of Happy Boy and Snack Man, in a way,” Cameron says. “As you walk up James Street and look back, there’s just this amazing theatre to it.”
Petite, the Votans’ fifth venue (or sixth if you count Mini, the next-door French pop-up that acted as a testbed for its food), has been a long time coming. Its build was complicated by having to tear out a false ceiling and knock down a wall between what was originally two separate tenancies, and then the kind of construction and installation delays that have become a common story post-pandemic.
But the result is worth the wait.
Petite retains the open feel of Happy Boy and Snack Man, but with a more precise design. It references a French bistro with the banquette and chandeliers and its bentwood chairs, but crosses it with an industrial touch that means it never feels like pastiche.
“Our philosophy has always been that we let the design lead it and then try and bring one or two elements of the cuisine or the culture’s aesthetic in,” Cameron says. “But this is a little more playful, a little prettier.”
“We were looking down the barrel of it being 100 per cent Asian concepts down [on East Street]. But when we started to look at this corner, and considered our interest in French, and we had this amazing young chef with Aubrey [who, before Mini, led the kitchen at Greenglass in the CBD, which the Votans closed in July last year], it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”
The approach to dining is unorthodox too.
Petite’s menu has 20 plates down one side of the page and matching wines listed down the other. But Cameron says it’s not intended to be dogmatic – a wine either side of the match will work just as well. There’s also a longer bottle list for those wanting to explore the restaurant’s collection of small-grower French drops, with Snack Man’s enormous cellar acting as a fallback.
“It looks simple on the page, but it took me a long time to work out how to actually bring those these two things together. It does mean there are some peculiarities with the menu. It’s not entree, main and dessert, or big, small or whatever the other sets of parameters that are usually used with menus – it’s just those 20 plates and 20 glasses.”
Courtel’s food is a continuation of what worked best at the Mini pop-up that ran next door in the old Kid Curry space for the past eight months.
For smaller dishes, you can order goat’s cheese croquettes, steak tartare with confit yolk and pommes gaufrettes, or a pork terrine with onion jam, cornichons and bread.
Larger plates include pan-fried gnocchi with a comte cream, panfried fish finished with a beurre blanc, confit duck with potato mash and a duck jus, and a char-grilled grass-fed eye fillet with pepper cognac sauce and French fries.
There’s also a clutch of desserts – including a shallow creme brûlée, a chocolate soufflé and a burnt Basque cheesecake – and a selection of cheese, with charcuterie soon to follow.
There’s no cutting-edge gastronomy here; that’s not what Petite is about. Rather, this is a love letter to the small neighbourhood bistros the Votans have discovered in Paris over the years, where humble ingredients are turned into killer food and served with wine, always.
As for the bottle list, it’s entirely French and encourages exploration, from Loire Valley whites and Rhone Valley reds to the distinctive drops of the Jura, and whites and reds from the wider Burgundy region. There’s also a chunky selection of cremant and champagne.
The Votans are excellent wine communicators and these lists express their own curiosities. And you can do some damage, if you like, with prices ranging up to a $3000 2002 vintage of Salon blanc de blancs. But the vast majority are approachable, priced so you can spend a long graze working through different drops with different dishes.
Beyond the wine, there’s a list of classic cocktails and a selection of beers.
“The French just have such an intuitive way about their wine and food, and how they match and how they go together,” Cameron says. “What we really wanted to show off here was everyday cuisine and everyday wine, and how they so beautifully come together.”
Petite opens for bookings this Tuesday, June 11.
Open Tue-Thu, 5.30pm-late; Fri 12pm-late; Sat 5.30pm-late.
Corner East and Ann Streets, Fortitude Valley.
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.