Sarni’s creators say they aim to make a meal in a sandwich. This is that.
Chefs will tell you staff meals often make the best dishes. As it turns out, they can make for the best sandwiches too.
“Especially in most restaurants, you would have a roster of who cooks the staff meal,” says Marty Coard, chef and co-owner of Sarni in Ascot. “So you’re getting influences from so many different cultures: Korean one day, Nepalese the next. You’re learning and having conversations about what you’re eating. It’s really eye-opening. So much of my favourite food comes from that.”
When Coard opened Ach in nearby Hamilton in 2023 with Noam Lissner and Mat Drummond, the daily “staffie” would often be a sandwich. The meal often involved Coard’s former colleague, Hugo Hirst, who worked for a brewer at the time, and would drop in with an ingredient when he was delivering beer.
“He’d maybe grab some meat from the Super Butcher and put something together. By then it was kind of obvious we wanted to do a sandwich shop.”
The said sandwich shop
The answer was Sarni, which Coard, Drummond, Hirst and Lissner opened just on a year ago in an unfussy, bright blue space on Racecourse Road. The menu? A tight set of sandwiches, all of which are served on either a slow fermented bun or focaccia (both house-made), but that otherwise rotate regularly.
“Our philosophy has always been to put a meal on a sandwich, which is what I think set us apart [at the time],” Coard says. “There’s no excuse to eat a shit sandwich. It’s not that much harder to make a really good one. That’s of course if you know how.”
A bunch of chefs applying that philosophy to a menu that changes every month means Sarni’s sandwiches were very good when it opened, and they’ve only gotten better since.
And there’s one in particular on the current menu that you need to try.
The Sarni beef brisket sandwich
This is as close to the ideal sandwich as we’ve witnessed in this town – at the very least in concept, if not in execution (more on that in a moment). It boasts a degree of thought that’s almost intimidating.
First, there’s the bread, which is close to the perfect sandwich bread. Coard describes it as being not quite a sourdough, although it’s fermented for 72 hours.
“It’s like a sourdough but more comfortable to eat,” he says. “We think it’s a nice vessel for a sanger.”
Then there’s the brisket, which is Angus beef brined for seven days, and smoked. They’re luscious chunks of beef with plenty of texture, but don’t stray into being dry or stringy.
“It’s more of a pastrami than a brisket, really,” Coard says. “But we don’t shave it because the cut beef feels like a better fit for this sandwich.”
The sauce is the stroke of genius. A Laotian-style jeow som chock full of coriander and chilli, it gives the sandwich a fresh, herby note, and offsets the low notes of the beef.
There’s some iceberg lettuce for texture and moisture, and a bone marrow beef fat mayo, with the chefs swapping out oil for rendered down beef fat, which adds a lovely long note of umami to the sandwich.
The final element is some fried shallots for a spike of flavour and extra crunch.
We’ve eaten the brisket sandwich twice. The first time it was arguably a touch under seasoned, but that was perhaps because we had it alongside Sarni’s pork sandwich, which is particularly salty (in a good way. It gives the brisket a run for its – our – money), but on the second go-around, it was more or less bang-on.
It’s hard to find a sanger with this much thought put into the flavour profile. A meal in a sandwich, indeed.
But then this thing is a product of that constantly evolving menu – it builds on the lessons learned from every previous brisket sandwich over the past 12 months. But that also means it won’t be around forever in its current form, so get around it while you can.
Where to get it
The Sarni beef brisket sandwich is $24, which isn’t cheap, but we think this is worth every penny. You can get one at 143 Racecourse Road, Ascot.
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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.
