An empty Gabba restaurant and an old pizza oven equals fun, fancy-free Mexican you need to pay attention to. Here’s what to expect.
Birria tacos aren’t easy.
You need to get your braise right. You need the correct corn for your tortillas, find the right amount – and type – of chillies, get your crisp right.
You don’t want to make your consomme too watery or too oily.
For something so casual and one-handed to eat, a lot goes into the preparation and cooking. You suspect it’s why some of the birria you encounter around town is so often bland and under-seasoned.
Andy Ashby describes the process as a labour of love.
“It comes down to understanding the culture and getting the correct ingredients,” Ashby says.
“We’re not just picking chilli off the shelf. We’re getting them imported from Mexico and going correctly down those channels and getting the right varieties, because they all have different properties.
“If you don’t respect what birria is and give it that time that it needs to just breathe and do its thing, you’re bastardising the culture of it.
“I’m not Mexican, so I wouldn’t want to make any claims to authenticity, but that just means I need to do more R&D, not less.”
Know what else is hard? Running a restaurant at the Mater Hill end of Stanley Street in Woolloongabba.
It’s a beautiful heritage set of buildings, but also in a weird no man’s land when it comes to nearby residential areas that can act as regular patronage.
But Ashby has made it work with C’est Bon, which, since he took the reins in 2020, has slowly built a reputation as one of the city’s best French restaurants.
It’s that skill with French food, one of the so-called “mother” cuisines, that Ashby has applied to Birria Boy, his new Mexican pop-up that will open in the former Clarence space, next door to C’est Bon.
“I think so,” Ashby says. “French cuisine has so many layers. When we go to make a nice consomme, say, there are essential foundations to that process.
“You apply that same methodology, but obviously with different ingredients. Right now, I’ve a mole negro and a mole rojo on the stove right now. These bad boys will maybe be going off for up to 10 hours.
“But it’s that fundamental building aspect that I’ve learned throughout my career and I’m taking across to Birria Boy.”
Birria Boy’s menu is, as you’d expect for a pop-up, pretty straightforward and makes use of the venue’s wood-fired oven – a relic from its Vespa Pizza days that remained dormant during the Clarence years.
The taco menu includes three birria tacos – a signature wagyu beef, a goat (the traditional meat for birria) and a mushroom – all served on housemade masa flour tortillas. There are also two regular tacos – a duck carnitas and a tempura king prawn.
There’s also a clutch of larger plates cooked on wood fire, including pork neck, chicken asado and cod cooked in banana leaf, with all served with tortillas and sauces.
Beyond that, it’s a bunch of snacks – corn ribs, chicharrones, a torched avocado guacamole, that kind of thing – and a few sides.
For drinks, there are cocktails – including an $18 house margarita – built on high-quality mezcals such as Bozal and Lost Explorer, Mexican beers, and a selection of other spirits. There’s also BYO wine for $20 corkage per bottle.
The fit-out remains much the same as the Clarence days, split across two of the heritage brick-walled tenancies in the old Shop Row building on Stanley Street, but Ashby has given it a liberal splash of red paint in places, and installed black tiling behind the open kitchen out front, finishing it with a neon sign that reads “Mexican”, just in case you were in any doubt about what this place is all about.
Ashby says it’s meant to be fun and fancy-free – the kind of thing you can dip into before or after a game at the Gabba or a show at the Princess Theatre around the corner.
“We want to make sure we look after that crowd that goes to the game or a show at the Princess,” he says. “It’s just a little love on the plate.
“Mexican has come such a long way in this city and it’s also about paying respect to guys who have really pushed it along, like Mama Taco [in West End] or Dan [Quinn] from Baja – he’s been so diligent just in terms of giving me some direction, which has been awesome.
“That’s what hospitality is all about.”
Open Thu 4pm-late; Fri-Sun 11.30am-2pm, 4pm-late; Mon 4pm-late.
617 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba.
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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.
