Brisbane dining 2025 in review
The local food scene faced numerous challenges before flexing its muscles in a variety of ways at the beginning of the year; some good, some not so good.
Chat to many restaurateurs in town right now and they’ll tell you they’re looking for plenty of summer reservations. This is a relief after the year they’ve had.
From the outside, Brisbane’s food scene looks extremely healthy. Go to Melbourne, talk to the post-COVID walking wounded in that city; They will express their envy at what they witnessed north of the Queensland-NSW border.
But the reality inside is always slightly different, and our metropolitan city is just over half the size of Melbourne and Sydney; This means the food scene is arguably more prone to the vagaries of the economy, consumer habits and natural disasters.
Brisbane looked to have it all covered in 2025.
The beginning of the year was marked by the hangover from years of high inflation and associated high interest rates. Then in March came former Tropical Hurricane Alfred, which extended the traditionally quiet months of January and February for many restaurateurs. Baja Modern’s Mexican owner, Dan Quinn, predicted at the time that Alfred (and the storm’s frustratingly late arrival) would wipe out close to two weeks of revenue.
“It’s a huge effort to try to get this back,” Quinn said.
Alfred was followed by record-breaking autumn rains and an unusually wet start to winter. By June, local operators could have been forgiven for wondering what the next step would be – one restaurateur described the year up to that point as “one after another” – and that was on top of the usual pressures such as high rents and rising food costs.
No wonder we’ve seen so many closures this year.
With Gum Bistro and Pneuma, Brisbane has lost two of its most exciting new restaurants. Elsewhere, party izakaya-inspired Goros lasted barely six months, Happy Fat closed classic burger joint Red Hook to focus on other projects, Lion Valley Stone & Wood opted to close its beer bar and New Farm’s bolt hole Gerties announced it would call time in the new year. Among the morning crowds, Choquette, Supernova and the iconic King Arthur Cafe all pulled up stumps.
Still, the bad news was drowned out by the good news due to the usual openings that dominated the news cycle. Here are a few interesting trends to uncover.
Eating and drinking CBD is the obvious one. The city has welcomed blockbuster openings like The Fifty Six atop Naldham House, and powerhouse Anyday has opened Golden Avenue and The French Exit a block away at the corner of Edward and Mary streets.
Kangaroo Point Bridge’s opening in late 2024 was followed by Tassis Group’s Stilts and Mulga Bill’s. Just up Edward Street was Frog’s Hollow and Alice’s Shaman from Peter Hollands, and the former Pneuma space was quickly snapped up by La Cache a Vin’s Romain Maunier to create Little Provence.
They join other relative newcomers such as Central, Naldham House Brasserie, Supernormal, Milquetoast and a host of venues opening in Queen’s Wharf in late 2024 to double down on the Brisbane CBD’s quest to boost its night-time economy.
But the question remains: What else is this movement based on, apart from restaurants and bars? There is late night shopping in Brisbane only one night a week and all the cinemas moved long ago. After all, even if all these places were good enough to survive, a person’s soul is not nourished by food and drink alone.
There were also many protests outside the city.
James Street and the Valley has seen the arrival of chic supper club Penelope, champagne hangout Winnifred’s, legit Thai cafe So What Stereo and wine bar Dark Blue, the follow-up to owner Hannah Wagner’s popular Dark Red.
In Newstead, Byron Bay-based Arcade Agency, known for its hugely popular Light Years, has opened the second installment of its Bar Monte Italian concept, and Harry Ohayon and Maxime Bournazel’s Rise Bakery in Breakfast Creek is starting to open late for dinner.
Meanwhile, in South Brisbane, Naga Thai has found a permanent home on the South Bank, and Fanda has opened Marlowe in a beautiful former heritage-listed apartment block on Fish Lane; Ben McShane and Matt Kuhnemann have opened a new take on the ultra-seasonal Clarence restaurant next door.
If you’ve read this far, you may have noticed another important trend for 2025: the prominent presence of restaurant groups at this year’s openings. Here, Brisbane appears to be approaching a turning point. Will we follow in the footsteps of Sydney, which is dominated by large hospitality groups, particularly Merivale, which has more than 90 venues across the city?
The economies of scale and scope that a restaurant group provides make sense in the modern environment, where margins have never been tighter. But it also raises concerns about homogenization and further squeezing of independents who are struggling to compete for staff and real estate deals.
Either way, bands in Brisbane are stretching; Sometimes mixed results are obtained.
Ghanem Group took on Melbourne this year and opened a Blackbird on Flinders Lane. Good Food’s Besha Rodell’s review was less than glowing. There’s an argument to be made that Blackbird was the wrong concept for that city, but I’d bet Ghanem was good enough too and cared enough to at least somehow right that ship.
Others use their great influence to put pressure on the food media to better control their image; this is something the masthead experiences and pushes back against.
So where does this leave the independents? This is a question with a few different answers, but the easiest is to stay further away from the city.
Many of our most memorable food and drink experiences this year have been in Brisbane’s varied suburbs and beyond, whether at Matt Okine and Dan Wilson’s LPO Neighborhood Wine Shop in Tarragindi, Tom Cooney and Jack Wakefield’s Landing bakery in Scarborough or Fatty Patty in Underwood.
It’s not brand new, but we had some of the best charcoal chicken of our lives at Sizzling Birds in Upper Gravatt Mountain, and owner Kesra Sefian treated us to a shawarma that was better than anything she says she ate growing up at Zooroona in Sydney (Gerard’s Johnny Moubarak is also a card-carrying fan), also in Underwood.
What’s more, our readers have responded to these stories, expressing interest in discovering these precious suburban gems for themselves. And perhaps that’s a sign of a healthier, more inclusive Brisbane food scene, for all the concerns about groups and costs and sluggish consumer behaviour.
Let 2026 come.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at the Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-in-chief at Broadsheet Brisbane and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among others.
