It might be 18 months late, but Brisbane is about to witness one of the most exciting restaurant openings of 2025.
Invite a diner into your venue as if you’re inviting them into your home. The best restaurateurs will tell you how important this is.
It’s a principle that feels acute with Marlowe, which not so long ago was someone’s home. Or a bunch of people’s homes.
Fanda Group (Southside, Rick Shores, Central, Norte) has taken the old Merivale apartment building in South Brisbane and transformed it into a head-turning 110-seat restaurant.
“The point of difference between our other venues and this one is that its previous purpose is very, very obvious,” co-owner David Flynn says. “People lived here. Southside and Central, they’re beautiful restaurants, but they’re definitely restaurants. This feels like it’s evolved from something else.
“It’s such a unique building, such a unique opportunity. It’s all about wanting to do that justice. It’s a healthy expectation that we have something that’s really cool and we want to make something that we’re proud of and that hopefully resonates with people.”
Regular Fanda designer J.AR OFFICE has created an interior that’s fastidiously sympathetic to the character of the original two-level apartments. There are nine distinct dining and bar spaces, a greenery-lined terrace, and four enclosed sunrooms. Materials include walnut timber, polished chrome and rich carpets. If restaurants are designed to transport you elsewhere, this does that, even if it’s more about a time than a place.
Fanda’s restaurants thus far have been all about capturing cuisines from other parts of the world — Hong Kong, pan-Chinese, Latin American and Thai — but with Marlowe’s built-in sense of place and nostalgia, the group has taken the opportunity to drill down on something much more Australian.
“My training in different Michelin kitchens back in England was all about turning beautiful produce into something else,” says Marlowe executive chef and co-owner Ollie Hansford (ex-Stokehouse Q and Siffredi’s).
“It was the done thing at the time. Whereas as I got older, ‘If you start off with incredible produce then you don’t need to turn it into something it’s not supposed to be.’ You just honour it, in a sense. You just want to buff it a little bit to make it shine – it’s sympathetic, similar to our approach to the restaurant itself.”
To that end, Marlowe’s extended gestation — it’s opening 18 months after originally intended — meant Hansford had the time to dig up producers and farmers, thus far not often seen in Brisbane restaurants, if at all.
Much of the seafood coming out of the kitchen is sourced from a co-operative of line fishermen working the east coast and producers such as Cherax Park Aquaculture, north of Gympie.
On the main menu, there’s stuffed 20-week chicken breast from Joyce’s Gold Heritage Chicken with mushrooms and a sherry sauce, and a rotating butcher’s cut that utilises citrus-fed wagyu from Elbow Valley Beef, west of Brisbane.
Elsewhere, on the starters there’s a truffled mushroom cannelloni with a sweet corn veloute and salsa verde, a signature duck pie with jus and radicchio jam, and a smoked cheese soufflé with carrot noisette sauce, ’nduja oil and pickled radish.
For mains, there’s a coral trout Wellington with chive butter sauce and caviar, a spiced pork chop with caramelised apple, garlic and a hazelnut jus, and celeriac schnitzel with café de Paris butter sauce and caviar.
Hansford’s a clever chef and he’s produced a clever menu that taps into the nostalgia the venue invokes without laying it on too thick.
Group beverage director Peter Marchant’s entirely Australian wine list (beyond its champagne) plays a similar gambit, calling upon both small and larger old-school producers, but in the case of the latter often reaching for their more distinctive older vintages. It also repeats the offer of half-carafe pours, which he introduced at Central last year to encourage diners to explore different drops.
Hansford likes to tell a story about some of the silverware he bought for the restaurant second-hand an hour outside of Brisbane.
“She was maybe in her 80s and I asked out of curiosity, ‘How did you come by them?’” he says. “And she said, ‘Oh they were a wedding gift for my parents … We’ve used them maybe once through that whole period.’
“So it’s nice that we’re taking that history and bringing it back to life. One story transforms into another.”
And that really is what Marlowe is about. Exploring these narratives, whether it’s of a building or of a wine or of a set of silverware. It’s what a restaurant at its best, when it strives to become a cultural object, should do.
“I think our own respect or search for nostalgia does come from getting older,” Flynn says. “But there’s a craving for authenticity and one way to do that is to produce something that reflects a different, simpler time.
“It’s almost a privilege in a way to kind of be able to tell those kinds of stories.”
Open Tue-Wed 5pm-9pm, Thu-Sat 12pm-3pm, 5pm-9pm
105 Melbourne Street, South Brisbane, (07) 3505 6412
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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.