Two ex-Gerard’s head chefs are overseeing the menu, but expect a different kind of Middle Eastern at Brisbane’s most anticipated restaurant opening of the year.
Maybe Golden Avenue was inevitable.
When Ben Williamson parted ways with Gerard’s Bistro at the end of 2018, he was “done” with Middle Eastern food. Agnes, which he opened close to two years later with business partners Frank Li, Tyron Simon and Bianca Marchi was pitched as a wood-fired restaurant, but what would become Anyday Group was particular about it not being Middle Eastern.
“I didn’t ever think I’d go back to it again,” Williamson says. “It was seven years, right? It just got really difficult when you’re cooking within the parameters of one cuisine for so long.”
In the intervening years, Anyday opened Bianca and Agnes Bakery on James Street, most recently relocating the latter to Merthyr Road in New Farm and rebranding it Idle. But in the background, Simon was beginning to get in Williamson’s ear.
“Ty was dripping honey for a while,” Williamson says. “‘Do you want to go back to it? We should do it.’ You’re always talking about ideas, and I’d be doing events in other states and overseas or whatever, and you’d bump into people who’d say, ‘Oh, we loved your Gerard’s.’
“You realise over time that it really was quite loved, and I guess, overall, it’s just been enough time for me to miss it.”
There were other elements that made the timing right – most notably the presence of Adam Wolfers as Anyday executive chef. Wolfers has his own storied background in Middle Eastern food, including taking the reins in the Gerard’s kitchen after Williamson’s departure.
Working together, it’s an almost intimidating proposition. Not that Golden Avenue, which opens tonight on Edward Street in the CBD, is anything like Gerard’s.
“We wanted to bring a little more of that Levantine approach to the cuisine – clean flavours, clean smells,” Williamson says. “Heaps of vegetables, lots of dips, olive oil. It’s the kind of food you can eat quite a lot of and feast, but still walk away feeling refreshed, not weighed down.
“Within the confines of Anyday, it’s more like what Bianca represents: food that you can come and enjoy and engage with more than a couple of times a week and not get fatigued with it.”
Bianca (or Same Same perhaps) but with Middle Eastern cuisine is a handy shorthand to describe Golden Avenue. It makes sense the moment you walk through the door. Jared Webb’s J.AR OFFICE has designed a restaurant which, for the most part, is open-air and full of greenery. Its many nooks and spaces – a curved booth here, a high-set stone table there – lend it a flexibility for different styles of dining.
The dominant materials are pink juparana granite and “fennel”-green concrete, the treatment coming alive at night with the venue’s clever feature lighting. Still, what strikes you most are the stacks of plants, or – as Simon previously described them to this masthead – Webb’s interpretation of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Williamson, Wolfers and head chef Tim Yates (whose CV includes a stint as the opening head chef at Ramael Scully’s Scully restaurant in London) are using multiple wood-fired ovens and coal grills to prepare a menu that covers dips, hot and cold mezze, and items from the garden, oven and grill.
For starters, you might order a fish nayyeh with labne, fresh mint, radish, baharat and burghul; a muhammarra dip with pickled walnut and pomegranate molasses; chickpea and broadbean felafel with a tahini tartar; or fried quail with a Levantine chilli oil, carob molasses, verjus and za’atar (a dish that recalls the much-loved bekaa wings from the Williamson era at Gerard’s).
Larger plates include wood-baked whole flounder with extra virgin olive oil, preserved lemon and za’atar; mechoui-style lamb shoulder with fermented daikon ajvar, mint, and black cardamom salt; and grilled wagyu bavette with blistered tomato, Turkish peppers and red onion.
It’s all designed to share, and maybe taken with a tabouli or a fattoush salad from the greens section.
For drinks, there’s a 150-bottle wine list and cocktails powered by 130 spirits on the back bar at neighbouring boozer GA, which opens tonight with the restaurant and features its own snack menu.
Golden Avenue sits in the Edward Street premises previously occupied by Buffalo Bar’s beer garden, and it’s the first opening in a larger hub of Anyday venues that will occupy the corner of Mary and Edward streets and incorporate the heritage-listed Coal Board Building.
“But it was clear to us that this always needed to [open] first,” Williamson says. “We first started talking about this three and a half years ago, so it’s been a long time coming.
“We’re getting away from the Valley, so it’s almost like a reinvention or an expansion of Anyday, but Jared’s design is a continuation of the stamp of the Valley restaurants.
“Between Bianca and Same Same, they’re quite unmistakably how people think about Anyday, and this is a continuation of that.”
Open daily 11.30am-2.45pm, 5pm-10pm (GA daily 11.30am-12am).
Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox.
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.
