It opened in 2021, but not to the owner’s original specifications. Now, there’s a new entrance, dining area and bar. “When you walk in now, there’s that sense of arrival.”
Sushi Room is complete.
What’s now often regarded as Brisbane’s best sushi restaurant may have opened in 2021, but not to owner Simon Gloftis’ original specs.
The wrinkle? An existing ground-floor tenant on the Doggett Street side of The Calile.
It meant a rework, with the intended street-side entrance relocated to a nondescript door just off The Calile lobby. It gave Sushi Room a low-key, hidden vibe, but Gloftis was never entirely happy with it.
“I always felt it needed a sense of arrival, a place like Sushi Room,” Gloftis says. “It’s a very special room, a really special environment … walking in off The Lobby Bar was OK, but it didn’t feel like you’d arrived anywhere. It felt a bit too easy.”
As of late May, though, Sushi Room is a restaurant transformed.
The Doggett Street tenant is gone, the former shopfront transformed into a new bar and al fresco dining area that, yes, also acts as the restaurant’s entrance.
In charge of the fit-out was regular Gloftis designers Richards & Spence. Compared with the soft moodiness of the restaurant dining room, the Brisbane-based firm has leant the new space a bolder, more approachable design that suits its street-side location, with upholstered booths, a striking marble bar and a mirrored ceiling installation. Outside, brushed-steel furniture lines the sidewalk, while inside a noren curtain leads the way to the original restaurant.
The new space is designed to be versatile — diners can use it to start or finish the night, or dine there a la carte — and gives the restaurant more scope to handle walk-ins.
“When you walk in there now, there’s that sense of arrival,” Gloftis says. “You go into the bar, through the noren curtain and into the dining room proper, and it’s oriented the right way. You walk in and all the sushi chefs are standing in front of you.
“The restaurant deserved that treatment. I couldn’t be happier.”
The central dining room remains much the same: there’s still the 9.3-metre imported enoki dining counter, and still the bright-red private dining room upstairs.
The menu remains much the same, and continues to leverage Gloftis’ deep connections with local suppliers and fishers: there’s alfonsino, fatty tuna and vinegared mackerel nigiri; mud crab and tempura prawn hand rolls; and toothfish and Kagoshima A5 rib eye cooked on the hibachi. Guests can order either a la carte or choose a $330 omakase experience.
“We’ve had some time off so we’ve improved a couple of little things,” Gloftis says. “We’ve added a beautiful little wakame salad and a couple of other little raw dishes that are really nice, but the bulk of the menu is 90 per cent the same.”
Gloftis likes to talk of a meal at Sushi Room as a journey, and reckons the updated restaurant completes that journey.
“It does,” he says. “The way the restaurant is set out now, people say, ‘It’s totally changed.’ And they look around and you go, ‘No, actually it hasn’t.’ It’s just that you’ve walked in a different door. You’re facing the right way. It just feels right.”
Open Tue-Thu 5.30pm-late; Fri-Sat 12pm-2.30pm, 5.30pm-late
The Calile Hotel, 48 James Street, Fortitude Valley, (07) 3741 5976
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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.
