The Mount Coot-tha eatery’s singular location could be an excuse for mediocrity. But Summit finds a formerly maligned operator and star chef striving to match its sky-high outlook.
14/20
Modern Australian$$
It made sense it would be Mantle Group.
The longstanding Brisbane-based hospitality powerhouse has a longstanding lockdown on some prime Brisbane City Council real estate – Jimmy’s On the Mall? Pig ‘N’ Whistle in King George Square? They’re both Mantle.
So when the council put its venue spaces atop Mount Coot-tha out to tender, the smart money was maybe always on Mantle scoring the lease. It has a successful track record with these sorts of locations, which need the kind of broad appeal that attracts locals as well as tourists.
Not so successful is its record in paying workers correctly, with Fair Work commissioner Jennifer Hunt blasting the group in 2022 for leaving staff on long-expired workplace agreements. And it could sometimes feel that way when you visited a Mantle venue – that you were being punched through before the staff could punch out.
But it’s the first thing you notice when stepping into the refurbed and reopened Summit Restaurant: the warmth with which you’re received. Over two visits, the service at The Summit, while sometimes uneven, was never not full of hospitality (for what it’s worth, I’m told management is now ultra-fastidious about meeting its payroll obligations).
Big smiles at the desk. Check. Seated in a buzzy section in an otherwise quiet restaurant. Check. Handed over to a section waiter who, on the one occasion she couldn’t answer a question about the menu, was upfront about asking the kitchen. Check. Check. Check.
There were some speed wobbles on a Tuesday night very early in the restaurant’s life, but by the time of a return visit a few weeks later, these had been mostly ironed out (and that was despite the venue having to juggle a sizeable private party on its balcony).
Still, it’s not the service we’re really here for, nor the fetching, if relatively safe, Hogg & Lamb fit-out, with its deep heritage greens, and rattan and polished timber features. It’s chef Kym Machin’s food.
The highlight on Machin’s lengthy CV is his time at iconic CBD diner Urbane in the 2000s and early 2010s; he was named chef of the year in the 2012 Queensland Good Food Guide. His presence behind the pass is a statement of intent.
Machin works in another sense, too. For years he’s been a westside local, operating cafes in Jindalee and Oxley while he raised his young family. You see it immediately on the share-plate menu with a Moreton Bay bug roll with “banh mi” flavours (the restaurant’s quotation marks, not mine) – a nod to days off spent sifting around nearby Vietnamese hotspots such as Darra and Inala.
It makes you smile, even if the dish itself turns out to be a bit too fiddly for my liking, the fried bug sitting high in a puffy brioche bun, and flopping out as I try to eat the thing, landing on my share plate in a puddle of herb and buttermilk dressing.
That’s courtesy of a second starter: Rocky Point cobia crudo finished with finger lime (and said dressing). Crudo, by now, is everywhere but this thing easily earns its existence. You sense the relative mildness of the cobia (compared to kingfish) has allowed Machin more scope with his other elements, the dish packing some welcome texture via sliced and julienned radish. The buttermilk dressing is a luxuriant final touch that doesn’t drift into overkill.
The best of the smaller plates, though, is the most straightforward, at least on the plate: a goat’s cheese puff with leek, pear and truffle herbs. There’s a lot of work under the hood here, it turns out, with the chefs cooking leeks in the sous vide and adding slow-roasted pears to the base.
The result is a minor sensation – the puff pastry flaking away as you seek out the gooey goodness inside. It’s simple, soul-warming comfort food given an upmarket touch.
We go in two very different directions for our main plates, but both are crackers.
Sous vide Rocky Point grouper sings when accompanied by crunchy rice, Thai and native herbs and nam jim jaew (a traditional Thai dipping sauce that here is used as a dressing). A lesser chef would have thrown this together and landed it in the ballpark, but in Machin’s hands it’s Swiss-precise, with a complex, thrilling flavour profile. The grouper is a good $20 more expensive than some of the other mains, but worth it.
For a quail cotoletta, Machin has sourced larger birds from Coominya, deboned and crumbed them with sourdough, herbs and dried scarmoza. On the plate, it’s finished with almonds, radish, Jerusalem sage and a beurre noisette. The crumb is pretty much perfect, with the texture of the dish rounded out by the almonds, a sprinkle of capers and the velvety beurre noisette. It’s the best cotoletta I’ve eaten in a long while.
Wine? Well, The Summit has it, I guess. We experiment with different drops throughout the meal, but pickings by the glass are relatively humdrum, the highlight a vivid, slatey 2023 Louis Moreau chablis. The list bills itself as favouring small producers and is well priced but could do with a touch more ambition to match the food, and there’s no pouring at the table.
We finish with a dessert called Our Garden Honey, which takes the good stuff from the restaurant’s own hives in Toowong and serves it with figs, scorched fig leaf creme, and honeycomb crisps. It’s lovely enough without being truly loveable, and we perhaps regret not nabbing a panna cotta that wobbled past the table earlier.
So what do you make of this place, a restaurant with a lot of ambition but also a degree of obligation to be all things to all people? Because that’s a very hard thing to pull off. And The Summit gets pretty close.
Machin says the menu will change format in the coming weeks, switching to a more traditional a la carte selection, with a degustation option. And that seems sensible. For many Brisbane locals, this will be an occasion restaurant where they’ve been summoned for a group dinner. A la carte better suits these kinds of situations with disparate diners, and cuts off the risk of cuisine clash on the share plates (for us, it was purposeful, but an everyday punter could’ve done with a bit of guidance from waitstaff).
Machin has mellowed since his Urbane days but isn’t one to suffer fools, and you suspect he’ll happily walk if someone or something messes too much with his execution. But if Mantle can get him to stick around while continuing to fine-tune the already engaging service, The Summit will prove a restaurant fit for its location.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Mountain-top occasion eating in a fetching, heritage-inflected dining room.
Go-to dishes: Goat’s cheese puff ($26); quail cotoletta ($49); Rocky Point grouper ($68).
Drinks: A relatively safe wine list, signature cocktails.
Cost: About $200 for two, excluding drinks.
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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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.
