Southside team to open Hong Kong-inspired dumpling spot in heart of CBD

If you’ve been to Hong Kong, you know Central.

The frenetic heart of that city, it’s crammed full of skyscrapers, malls and luxury hotels. The district is also where you’ll find some of the city’s best food and drink, often hidden down colourful laneways and side streets.

“It’s a bit of a sensory experience,” David Flynn says. “There’s stuff happening everywhere. You go into a little bar and it’s tiny, but it’s this amazing experience, and then you walk two metres that way and there’s another completely different venue. There’s always a lot to take in.”

Now Flynn and his Rick Shores and Southside co-owners (Frank Li, Andrew Hohns and Nick Woodward) are bringing a slice of that buzz to the heart of Brisbane, opening a subterranean restaurant and dumpling bar on Queen Street in the city. Its name? Central, of course.

Onboard as partners and helping spearhead Central are Benny Lam and Maui Manu, currently executive chef and restaurant manager of Southside, respectively. Lam’s experiences of living and working in Hong Kong as a designer have informed much of the new venue.

“I last lived in Hong Kong maybe 10 or 12 years ago,” Lam says. “And the food and the living style, I do miss it sometimes. There’s that vibe and that energy, every day.

“You eat out probably six nights a week when living there. Everyone lives in apartments so you don’t really invite people over … you leave work at maybe six or seven and there’s no point in heading home – you just go out to dinner with someone. [Those venues] become that third place.”

Lam and Flynn want Central to serve a similar role for Brisbane CBD office workers and apartment dwellers with its dim sum menu, which features prawn har gao, Peking duck potstickers, a Hong Kong-style wonton soup that’s poured at the table, and “Old Hong Kong” chicken steam buns.

But that’s just a jumping-off point for a menu that looks to capture the array of flavours that run through Hong Kong’s dining scene, where classic Cantonese food is coloured by western influences.

For cold starters, there’s drunken chicken with aged shaoxing rice wine, red date and golden sesame; white-cut kingfish with ginger radish, spring onion, white soy; and smoked foie gras with youtiao (Chinese fried dough) and Davidson plum.

From the wok, there’s sweet and sour pork served in a half pineapple, and Goolwa pipis with a prosciutto XO sauce and crispy egg noodles. Barbecue dishes include char siu pork, classic roasted half duck, and South Australian abalone with XO butter and smoked bottarga.

“Southside is obviously broadly Chinese,” Flynn says. “But we felt there was a place for something more specifically Hong Kong and had dumplings as its focus. It doesn’t have to be super formal, and it’s great to share. It’s a very flexible style of eating.”

For drinks, group wine director and veteran sommelier Peter Marchant is overseeing a list that mixes classic styles and regions with newer, more experimental producers from Australia and overseas. About 30 wines will be available by the glass, half glass and half bottle (via Coravin), allowing diners to mix and match their drops with the various flavours of Lam’s menu.

For cocktails, Flynn is promising a bunch of interesting twists on the classics, such as a house Harvey Wallbanger, a nitrogen-compressed pina colada and the Sichuan martini sidecar.

The 80-seat restaurant itself will sit down a flight of stairs in the 1955-built (but recently refurbished) Piccadilly Arcade building on Queen Street, opposite Central Plaza. It was once the storied Primitif Cafe, where Brisbane beatniks gathered in the late ’50s and early ’60s to listen to poetry and jazz.

Gun architect and designer Jared Webb of J.AR OFFICE – celebrated for his recent work on the refurbished Gerard’s Bistro – has been tasked with tapping some of that Primitif spirit while creating a tiered, low-lit space of granite and timber that makes the most of its exposed-rock walls. The kitchen and bar will sit in the centre of the space, the star of the show.

“We want to create a feeling of things that you experience in Hong Kong, the basement restaurant,” Flynn says. “You get that all the time, but even just the subway stations in Hong Kong – you’re always going down underground, in a sense.

“It’s about capturing some of that essence of Primitif, but also a bit of the nightclub history of Hong Kong – places like Disco Disco, this famous nightclub that was in an old sewing factory in a basement in Lan Kwai Fong.”

David Flynn

“It will almost feel like a corporate office crossed with a brutal train station, with a kitchen showing off this beautiful lighting installation.

“It’s about capturing some of that essence of Primitif, but also a bit of the nightclub history of Hong Kong – places like Disco Disco, this famous nightclub that was in an old sewing factory in a basement in Lan Kwai Fong [a sub-district of Central]. Hong Kong has this really rich colourful history – all this incredible stuff, and we wanted to acknowledge that.”

Central will open at 340 Queen Street in October.