Get your own shrimp

Sick of buying un-named, generic seafood? Tired of just asking for a kilo of "those" king prawns?

Well next time you head down to your local seafood supplier, you could just be buying your very own shrimp. I was just reading through Food Detective in today's Weekend Australian, only to find out that the Australian Marine Conservation Society is running an eBay auction to name a new species of shrimp. You can read about it on the AMCS website here. Of course all profits from the auction go towards marine conservation.


When I checked today, bidding on eBay was up to $3,050.00. So if you win the $20 million lotto tonight, make sure you throw in a generous bid! You've got to admit it's a very cool looking shrimp.

Jellyfish

Jellyfish is John Kilroy's newish seafood restaurant in the city. Not content with having the best meat eatery in town, he's now stepped out to conquer the seafood side of things.

Jellyfish is in an excellent spot. Right on the river (well as close as you can get in the city), with excellent views across to the Story Bridge.

We were shown to our table, at which time our waiter explained the menu. There's a selection of 8 line caught fish every day, cooked as the chef chooses. If you don't like the chef's choice, then there are 10 different ways you can have each of the fillets cooked, including with tarragon & star anise batter, or perhaps gluten free crumbs if, like me, you've never come across gluten free crumbed fish in your life before.

And if you don't just want a simple fish option, there are 9 entrees and 8 mains to catch your attention (including non-seafood options like beef, duck and lamb).

But if you wander in to Jellyfish, you're here to eat seafood. Always being one to trust a chef's instinct, I couldn't go past a couple of the line caught options. Plus it's not every day of the week that you get a choice of 8 line caught fish. The hard part was picking which two to have ($38 for two fillets). The choices were:

• Seared hiramasa king from Port Lincoln with olive & caper sauce
• Crumbed coral bream from Bowen with home made chilli sauce
• Grilled butterfish from Bowen with chermoula emulsion
• Oven baked coral trout from Bowen with saffron emulsion
• Crumbed flathead from Auckland with home made chilli sauce
• Deep fried whole flounder from the south island of NZ with Asian dressing
• Tempura goldband snapper from Gladstone with Vietnamese sauce
• Oven baked barramundi from Cone Bay with lemon & shallot sauce

As you can see from that excellent list, it's pretty hard to narrow it down to two fillets. After a lot of thought, I went for the butterfish (because I'd never tried it before) and the barramundi (because really good barramundi is hard to beat).

Accompaniments are $6 each, and include shoe string fries, seasonal veges and an Asian salad with cucumber, chilli & mint.

By this stage of the meal we definitely needed a glass of white wine to accompany the seafood which was soon to arrive at the table. I was really impressed with the wine list at Jellyfish - they have really done their homework. It must be one of the best wine by the glass selections anywhere in Brisbane. How many other Brisbane restaurants serve 5 rieslings by the glass? None as far as I know. Sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio, pinot gris, gewurztraminer, semillon sauvignon blanc, chardonnnay and Chablis round out a fantastic selection of whites. All the white wines by the glass are priced between $9 and $16.50.

I ordered a glass of the Spring Vale gewurztraminer from Tasmania ($11), which was excellent. If you've got plenty of time up your sleeve, there are of course plenty of bottles on the list as well. I had to go back to work, so sadly a bottle of wine just wasn't an option.

My fish came out fairly quickly. The fillets are served with their sauces in separate little containers, which I think is a great idea. That stops one strong sauce completely overpowering all the fish on your plate. The butterfish turned out to be one of the best fish fillets I've had in a long time. It was only just cooked and had a perfect texture. It just melted in my mouth, and I wish I'd ordered two fillets instead of one. The chermoula emulsion was also a good match with the butterfish.

Unfortunately though the barramundi was underwhelming. It was a fairly small fillet, and really came off second best next to the butterfish. I wish I had gone with my first thought and ordered the coral trout instead.

Although my barramundi was a bit disappointing, Jellyfish is exactly what Brisbane needs. A clever selection of line caught fish, coupled with a great view and a super wine list. It's the perfect spot for lunch on a Summer's day. No doubt it will be a hit with both tourists and locals alike.

I have to say though that the service wasn't up to the standard of the food. Our waiter was a bit lost when it came to wine selections (luckily we knew what we wanted anyway), and also told us that jamon serrano was French ham. With a bit of tweaking, the service can be improved to make Jellyfish a memorable spot for your next seafood meal. It's not exactly cheap though, so you won't be able to pop in for a weekly feed.

It's good to see a new restaurant throwing down the gauntlet to Brett's Wharf, which I've considered to be Brisbane's best seafood restaurant for the last 5 or so years.

If it's seafood and white wine you're after, toddle along to Jellyfish. It's the perfect spot for a lazy lunch.

What does all this mean? An excellent selection of line caught fish, a great position and a brilliant wine list.

Jellyfish
Boardwalk Level, Riverside Centre
123 Eagle Street
Brisbane 4000
P - 07 3220 2202
E - info@jellyfishrestaurant.com.au
W - http://www.jellyfishrestaurant.com.au

Cam Ranh

My quest to visit as many of Brisbane's Vietnamese restaurants as I can this time led me to Cam Ranh at Darra. We had tried to get into Que Huong, but it looked packed and when we arrived a Chinese dragon was dancing through the restaurant to the sound of some great drumming. I was starving, so we walked around the corner to Cam Ranh instead.

It turned out Cam Ranh was pretty much full as well, but they did find us a table out on the footpath. As soon as we sat down, a thermos of jasmine tea was brought to our table, which was really thirst quenching on a steamy summer night.

My attention was quickly grabbed by the hand written sign on the front door, which said "Mud Crab $35/kilo". Last time I had mud crab at an Asian restaurant it was about $60 a kilo, so the price at Cam Ranh sounded like a bargain.

The menu at Cam Ranh is enormous, with over 200 dishes to choose from, covering both Vietnamese and Chinese food. The menu is broken down into entree, soup, Pho, Hu Tieu (clear rice noodle soup), Mi (egg noodle soup), congee, rice, rice vermicelli, rice paper rolls, chow mein, Hofan noodles, pippis, clam, sweet shell (I wasn't exactly sure what that was), oyster, soft shell crab, mud crab, fish, lamb, chicken, duck, beef, pork, prawn, scallop, calamari and vegetables. You could eat here every week for a year and not even get close to trying all the dishes.

Before arriving at the restaurant, I'd already decided I'd have a soup for entree, so it was just a matter of picking one. There were about 25 to choose from, which meant it wasn't the easiest of decisions. After weighing up interesting soups like crab meat & asparagus, Pho tai gan (rice noodle soup with tendon) and Hu Tieu tom thit (prawn & pork clear rice noodle soup), I ordered the Pho tai (rice noodle soup with sliced beef). Sometimes I just can't go past a good bowl of Pho.

The Pho tai came out in a big bowl, with plenty of flat rice noodles. The soup was served with a separate plate which contained bean sprouts, sliced red chilli, basil and lemon. That way you can make the Pho as hot or as tangy as you like. I loaded it up with a handful of bean sprouts, a few bits of chilli and plenty of basil. As hungry as I was, I didn't manage to finish it. The soup had a lovely beefy, slightly salty flavour and was great. The other reason I didn't finish the Pho is because when I was about half way through the bowl, my huge plate of mud crab arrived at the table.

We also ordered a serve of the rice paper rolls with vegetarian spring rolls. Again, this turned out to be a big serving. The fillings were rice vermicelli, lettuce, mint, bean sprouts, cucumber, pickled carrot and radish. I made up a couple of rolls (I can't resist a rice paper roll on a hot summer night), but we still got nowhere near finishing the plate.

There are so many choices for main course on the menu, I won't even try to go through them. Some of the dishes that appealed to me were pippis in XO sauce, soft shell crab in salt & pepper, Vietnamese fish hot pot, duck in Son Dong style, camp fire beef with rice paper salad and the chilli scallops. Although they all sounded great, I couldn't go past the Singapore mud crab. I know it's not Vietnamese, but it's not every day you walk into a restaurant with such good value mud crabs, so it would have just been wrong of me not to order it. If Singapore mud crab isn't your thing, there were about 8 other mud crab options, which are no doubt equally as delicious.

When I ordered the mud crab, the waitress asked me if it was just the 1 kilo. Maybe she thought I needed a bit of fattening up, but there was no way I was going to get through 2 kilos by myself.
As it turned out, almost everyone else in the restaurant seemed to be eating mud crabs. The three young Vietnamese kids sitting at the table next to us with their parents were tucking into a huge platter of mud crabs, which was just making me hungrier by the minute.

Anyway, as with all the rest of our meals, my mud crab was huge. We found out later when we paid that it was all one crab, that was actually 1.2 kilos. I don't think I've ever eaten so much crab in my life before. The mud crab had been broken into plenty of manageable bits, and was absolutely coated in the Singapore sauce. There were no crab crackers, so you either had to dig the crab meat out with a chopstick (which worked pretty well) or just crack them in your teeth, which is what all the locals were doing. The mud crab was excellent. It hadn't been overcooked, and had plenty of crab flesh. There was so much that, despite my best efforts, I just couldn't finish it. I hadn't even ordered any rice. By the way, the reason there's no photo of the mud crab is because my hands were covered in sauce by that stage of the night.

I've already mentioned that my mud crab came out before I'd finished the Pho. Actually, both our mains arrived while we were still munching away on our starters. It was a hot night, so neither of them were going to go cold, but it didn't give our stomachs a chance to have a break before the next round of food.

Our other main course was a soup with tofu, herbs and vegetables, which my wife had ordered from the steamboat section of the menu. Although this looked great when it arrived, it turned out to be full of pork, which wasn't mentioned on the menu. When my wife checked with the waitress, she was told that it wasn't meat, it was pork. Anyway they were good enough to take it away and replace it with a plate of stir fried vegetables in oyster sauce. There were plenty of snow peas, Chinese broccoli, carrot, mushroom and corn, which were piled up on the plate. I didn't actually try any, because I was too preoccupied with my mud crab, but I'm told it was very tasty.

I eventually admitted defeat on my mud crab. By that time both my hands and probably half my face were covered in the Singapore sauce (not to mention my shirt). Luckily for me though we still had the hot water bowl from the rice paper rolls and we'd both been given hand towels, so that was all cleaned up pretty quickly.

By this stage of the night we hadn't actually managed to finish one of the dishes we ordered, so dessert wasn't an option. All up, our dinner was $72, which included a lychee drink and a fanta. When you consider that my mud crab was $40, the food at Cam Ranh is great value.

Cam Ranh is BYO, and there is a bottle shop just around the corner. The inside of the restaurant looks very similar to many suburban Asian restaurants around Australia. It was definitely preferable to the footpath where we sat, which was pretty much devoid of any ambience at all. But the food was good, and that's why we'd made the trip out to Darra in the first place.

If you're looking for a new Vietnamese restaurant to try, Cam Ranh would be a good start. It has such a huge menu that it would be the perfect place to take a bunch of friends and order a whole heap of food you've never tried before. Or you could just order about 5 different mud crabs in and be in seafood nirvana for the rest of the night. Be warned though, if everyone orders a dish each, you'll never get through them all.

Although the decor and surroundings at Cam Ranh are pretty basic, and service is of the quick, no fuss variety, the food is good. I'll definitely be going back, even if its just for more of their delicious mud crabs.

What does all this mean? A huge selection of Vietnamese and Chinese food, with an emphasis on seafood, at very reasonable prices.

food bling ratings
Food - Good
Service - Ok
Ambience - Not much out on the footpath
Value for Money - Great
Wine - BYO
Vegetarian - Ok

Cam Ranh
23 Railway Parade
Darra 4076
P - 07 3375 4348

Samies Girl

I had a real longing for a seafood lunch yesterday, so I headed over to Samies Girl at Hamilton. I'd heard lots of good things about Samies Girl, but had never actually made it into the shop until yesterday.

Anyway it turned out to be a great place to buy seafood. There are prawns, oysters, scallops, mussels, whole fish, fish fillets, crabs, bugs and octopus in the display cabinet, together with a few doors of frozen seafood. I was there at about 1pm on a Tuesday and the place was surprisingly busy. Obviously I wasn't the only one in need of some good seafood on a hot Summer's day.


I ended up with a dozen small oysters from Port Macquarie and two plump Moreton Bay bugs for $26. The bugs had plenty of flesh in them and were particularly good.

If you live on the Northside, pop in to Samies Girl next time you're on the lookout for good seafood. It sure beats driving all the way out to Scarborough for a trip to Morgans.

Samies Girl
15 Hercules Street
Hamilton 4007
P - 07 3131 4120
W - http://www.samiesgirl.com.au/

Peter's Fish Market

My favourite place to get fish & chips at the Gold Coast is Peter's Fish Market. I can't remember how I stumbled across it the first time, but for the last few years it's the only place at the GC where I buy seafood.

Peter's Fish Market is a pretty innocuous looking building, only just down the road from more salubrious places like Palazzo Versace, Marina Mirage and the Sheraton Mirage Resort. Once you step inside though, your senses will quickly be drawn towards all the terrific fresh seafood on display. You'll find oysters, bugs, crabs, prawns, octopus, whole fish and the list goes on.

The best part about Peter's Fish Market though is that you can pick a fillet of fish (there are usually about 15 or so to choose from) and get that fillet cooked exactly how you like, with a serve of crunchy chips, wedges or whatever takes your fancy. It's much more fun than the fish & chips "special" that we've all eaten at some stage or another. For me, usually it's a toss up between red emperor or coral trout, which are my two favourite fish. This time I went for a good thick fillet of coral trout, which was grilled perfectly. You'll pay for the fillet according to its weight, plus a small cooking charge. Believe me, its worth paying a few more dollars for some quality fish & chips.

Once you've got your prawns, oysters or fish & chips, there are tables outside and across the road. If you're there at a busy time though, seats will be at a premium.

Next time you're feeling peckish for some seafood at this end of the Gold Coast, drop in to Peter's Fish Market. You'll find it hard not to walk out with bags full of fresh seafood.

Peter's Fish Market
120 Seaworld Drive
Main Beach 4217
P - 07 5591 7747
E - shop@petersfish.com.au
W - http://www.petersfish.com.au/

Browns of Mooloolaba

I always love coming across new places that sell fresh seafood. Browns of Mooloolaba sell seafood that is about as fresh as you'll ever get. Their prawns, crabs and bugs are locally caught, which means they come straight off the boat to you.


I was lucky enough to have a feast of fresh prawns and Balmain bugs today for lunch, which were delicious. The best thing about really fresh prawns is that you just can't stop eating them. Luckily we only bought a kilo, so we had to stop eating eventually.

Browns of Mooloolaba also sell oysters, fish fillets and a variety of gourmet foods from the Spirit House, Tetsuya, Maggie Beer and Simon Johnson.

Browns of Mooloolaba
10 Parkyn Parade
Mooloolaba 4557
P - 07 5444 6422
E - enquiries@brownsofmooloolaba.com.au
W - http://www.brownsofmooloolaba.com.au/

Singapura

Earlier this year I rounded up a bunch of friends and headed to Singapura for my birthday dinner. I'd tried to go for Chinese New Year, but they were completely booked out.

Singapura is one of those few restaurants where I've only ever had great food. I hadn't been there for a year or so and had been dying to go back. Last time I was there the table next to us had this giant pile of crabs that looked so good I wanted to invite myself over and eat their dinner.

As you'd guess from its name, Singapura serves Singaporean food, together with some Malaysian dishes. This is the place to go if you like sambal, but there is also a great selection of seafood dishes.

Because it was my birthday, keeping notes of the food I ate was pretty low on the list of priorities for the night. So if this post is a bit hazy, you know why.

To start with I had the lettuce wraps. These were like san choy bau. They were tasty enough, but I found them a bit sloppy. There was too much sauce in the wraps, which meant that by the time I'd finished them, they were all over the table in front of me. I also tried the sweet corn soup, which was a tad salty for my liking.

After a few glasses of wine, it was on to main course. Ever since I saw the Food Safari episode on Singapore, I have been dying to try Singaporean chilli crab. I had my heart set on ordering one, until I saw the dreaded "market price" on the menu. I asked our waitress what the market price was. After she made a quick trip to the kitchen, I was told it would be $60. It took me a few minutes to decide whether I really wanted it that much, but it was my birthday after all, and I thought Singapura was probably one of the best places in Brisbane to give it a try. So after checking I actually had enough cash, I ordered the chilli crab.

The crab was delicious. It wasn't mind blowing, but I think that's just because I had been dreaming about how good it would taste ever since the one they cooked up for Meave on Food Safari. It sure looked like a lot of pieces of crab. The crab had been broken up into manageable bits, and every single piece was smothered in the beautiful chilli sauce. If you do order this, be prepared to have bits of crab and sauce all over your face, hands, arms and the table in front of you by the time you finish. That's because you'll end up slurping every last bit of crab flesh off the shells and legs. The crab was good, but I still don't know if it was $60 worth of good. No matter how much it cost, I'm glad I got to try it.

If you want to have a crack at cooking Singapore chilli crab at home, here's the recipe from Food Safari. It's not too complicated, and there's even a video you can watch on to help you put it all together. Believe me, it will be worth the effort.

I was too busy slurping away at my crab to eat too many of the other main courses. The salt and pepper tofu was delicious though. I love silken tofu, especially at Japanese restaurants, but otherwise I'm not the biggest fan of fried tofu. This was an exception - the tofu was crispy and really tasty. I was told that the spicy eggplant was also great. Eggplant isn't something you come across at many Asian restaurants, so we ordered it out of curiosity. It turned out to be delicious, spicy and unusual. The mixed vegetables in oyster sauce was ok, but tasted like the oyster sauce had just been poured over the top after the vegetables had been cooked.

There are a few desserts on the menu, including the ubiquitous deep fried ice-cream. By this stage of the night we'd all had a few drinks, so we ordered the agar agar with rambutan, just to see what it was. I had tried rambutans before, but not agar agar. Wikipedia tells me that agar-agar is the Malay word for jelly, and is derived from seaweed. Although it sounded wildly exotic, it turned out to be a bit of a letdown. The agar agar didn't taste like much and the three rambutans tasted like they'd come straight out of a tin. Maybe I just had high expectations after the chilli crab.

The decor at Singapura is pretty basic, although if you sit in the back part of the restaurant there are these cool landscape cut-outs against the wall. It's hard to describe them in words, so you'll just have to go and see them for yourself. Singapura can also get pretty noisy, as the place is usualy very busy, and it's popular with groups. Singapura is BYO, which means that a night of delicious food here doesn't end up costing too much. There is a handy bottle shop just on the other side of Milton road.

Service is usually friendly and efficient, although things can get a bit hectic when the place is full. Prices are excellent, unless of course your whole table decides to go for the chilli crab.

I think Singapura is one of the better Asian restaurants in Brisbane, where you can always count on a tasty feed. I certainly don't know of too many restaurants in Brisbane that specialise in Singaporean food, so its definitely worth a visit.

What does all this mean? Tasty Singaporean food and a great range of seafood at low prices.

food bling ratings
Food - Good
Service - Good
Ambience - Fairly basic, but keep an eye out for the landscapes at the back of the room
Value for Money - Great
Wine - BYO
Vegetarian - Good

Singapura
Shop 3, 524 Milton Road
Toowong 4066
P - 07 3870 2266

Caxton Street Seafood Festival

Hanging out for a massive feed of seafood while wandering around listening to live music? Well take yourself along to this year's Caxton Street Seafood Festival, being held on Sunday 4 May 2008.

You can find out all the info about this year's fesitval here. This year, tickets are $15 and you can buy them from Ticketek, to save lining up on the day. $2 from every ticket goes to the Courier Mail Children’s Fund.

Tweed River Seafood

Tweed River Seafoods is the place to buy any kind of seafood if you're in the Kingscliff area.

It's actually just up the road at Chinderah, but it'll take you less than 5 minutes to drive from Kingscliff, and its well worth the trip.

Sure, it doesn't have a massive range, but what it does have is excellent. If its cold seafood you're after, then there is a range of fresh fish, prawns and crabs, together with Balmain bugs, squid, oysters and scallops. The seafood is helpfully marked, so you know if what you're buying is fresh or frozen.

Of course, you can also get cooked fish and chips here too. It's very popular with the locals, so pick your visits carefully or you might be in for a bit of a wait.

Tweed River Seafoods also sell a selection of their own home made seafood sauces, which are delicious. The tartare sauce in particular is completely addictive once you start dipping hot chips into it.

On my most recent visit, I picked up a Balmain bug, a dozen Sydney rock oysters and 300 grams of headless fresh king prawns for $26. The prices here are excellent.

So if you're after a feast of fresh seafood, or just some fish and chips for lunch, pop into Tweed River Seafoods next time you're at Kingscliff.

Tweed River Seafoods
78 Chinderah Bay Drive
Chinderah NSW 2487
P - 02 6674 1134

Mooloolaba Fish Market

The Mooloolaba Fish Market is my favourite place to buy seafood (fresh or cooked) in the Mooloolaba/Maroochydore area.

It's a fantastic place to buy just about any fresh seafood - whole fish, fish fillets, prawns, bugs, crabs, scallops, oysters etc. And they also have a great range of cooked seafood, if you are just after some fish and chips. Sit on the deck upstairs, overlooking the trawlers and munch away on some of the freshest, tastiest seafood on the Sunshine Coast.

On my most recent trip we picked up a dozen oysters, half a kilo of fresh green headless prawns and a sand crab for $34. Great value, and even better once we started eating it. The sand crab in particular was beautifully sweet. Although I felt terribly lazy, its also great to be able to get headless green prawns, which saves about 5 seconds in peeling after they've been cooked up (not to mention the scraps).

Best of all, plenty of the seafood comes from their own local company - Mooloolah River Fisheries - which also exports seafood all over the world.

But be warned, the fish market can get very busy in peak times - at school holidays and on weekends - but the wait is definitely worth it.

Mooloolaba Fish Market
Lot 201 Parkyn Parade
Mooloolaba 4557
P - 07 5452 4611
E - seafood@mooloolahfish.com.au
W - http://www.mooloolahfish.com.au/retail.htm

Il Centro

I think its fair to say that Il Centro is one of Brisbane's iconic restaurants. It's been at the Eagle Street Pier in the City since 1992 and is still going strong. Il Centro is incredibly popular with the business crowd - walk past at lunch time almost any day of the week and you'll find it full.

Although Il Centro is through and through an Italian eatery, it has a definite Queensland focus. All through the menu you'll find crab, barramundi, Moreton Bay bugs, king prawns and even crocodile.

It's also a perfect spot for lunch because of the great view out over the river through to the Story Bridge. The combination of the great view and the Queensland ingredients are also popular with tourists.

Every time I eat here, I always find it hard to choose from the terrific menu. The entree menu itself is pretty wide extensive. It covers a range of breads, pizza, soup, Moreton Bay bugs, oysters, scallops, crocodile, gnocchi and carpaccio. Starters which sounded good were the fantasia di granseola (a seafood selection of fresh crab and avocado salad with tomato gazpacho, crisp soft shell crab with fennel salad and salsa verde, and the renowned sandcrab lasagne - $23.50 per person), the sauteed scallops with lime carnaroli risotto, asparagus, prosciutto and tarragon jus ($22.50) and the char grilled Moreton Bay bugs, cauliflower with vanilla bean and baby cos salad, lemon aioli ($28). As good as all of those options sounded, there was a sandcrab and asparagus salad on the specials board, which was exactly what I felt like to kick off the meal. Our excellent waitress described this dish perfectly - layers of iceberg lettuce, chunks of avocado and lots of beautifully sweet sand crab. This was the perfect elevation of a couple of fairly simple, but high quality ingredients into an excellent dish.

By now the place was pretty much full with a big lunch crowd, but that didn't slow down the service of our mains, which came out after a perfect pause between courses.

There are also plenty of mains to choose from. A number of the entrees can be served as either starters or mains, so if there are a couple of entrees that take your fancy, then you can have them both.

First of all there is Il Centro's famous sandrab lasagne ($34). This dish was created by Gillian Hirst and has been a staple of the menu for years. It is a beautiful dish, but be warned, it's also very rich. You may find that the entree sized portion a bit more manageable. By the way, if you are a big fan of Gillian Hirst's sandcrab lasagne, you can now buy an eat at home version from a selection of good food stores around Brisbane - you can find more details here.

If you've already tried the sancrab lasagne, there are of course plenty of other options. If you aren't looking for seafood, there is also chicken, duck, veal, kangaroo, beef and lamb. I was tempted by the marinated kangaroo striploin with desiree mash, braised lettuce and pancetta, mustard fruits and red wine jus ($31.50) and the selection of Queensland seafood with saffron risotto, tossed with tomato and a touch of chilli ($37.50).

In the end, I decided to order the grilled North Queensland barramundi with desiree potato mash, new season asparagus and balsamic jus ($36.50). The barramundi was perfectly cooked, the crispy skin on the bottom of the fillet contrasting with the delicate flesh of the fish. Again, this was not an overworked dish, and allowed the flavour of each of its components to shine through.

The wine list complements the Italian food, and there are plenty of good whites to match with your seafood. It's also fairly reasonably priced, given its location and views over the river.

The other thing which has always been a constant at Il Centro is the excellent service. I've always found the staff here to be very knowledgeable, approachable, efficient and friendly. Our service on this visit was up to the usual standard. Although I thought our service might have been a tad overly business-like today, that's probably just a reflection of the customers who fill the place day after day at lunchtime.

Il Centro is not a destination for cutting edge culinary adventures. But if you want excellent Italian food or seafood, cooked with beautiful ingredients and teamed with excellent service, then it's hard to go wrong at Il Centro.

What does all this mean? Top notch Italian food, with a focus on Queensland produce

food bling ratings
Food - Great
Service - Top Shelf
Ambience - Smart surroundings with a great view out over the Brisbane river
Value for Money - Good
Wine - Good
Vegetarian - OK

Il Centro
Eagle Street Pier
Eagle Street
Brisbane 4000
P - 07 3221 6090
E - admin@il-centro.com.au
W - http://www.il-centro.com.au/

Belgian Beer Cafe Brussels

Belgian Beer Cafe Brussels is one of my work's usual after hours drinking venues. Its a bit of a wordy name, but luckily there aren't too many Belgian beer establishments in the Brisbane CBD, so you can't really get confused.

Of course the main attraction here is the excellent selection of Belgian beers. Lets face it, Belgian beer is great, and its always nice to knock back a few after a long week. You know a place is serious when they have a beer menu. If you're looking for somewhere to spend $27 on a Chimay Grande Reserve, then this is the spot for you.

But if you wander in here for lunch one day, they also serve a decent selection of food. I had lunch here recently. The menu has a few starters, which didn't really take my fancy. But we were only here on a quick lunch, so there wasn't time for two courses anyway.

For me, Belgian food means frites with mayonnaise, chocolate and mussels. They were the things I couldn't go past in Belgium, so there wasn't really much to decide here. The only decision was which of the mussels to go for. Belgian Beer Cafe Brussels serves mussels Provencale, mariniere, poulette and Creole (all $26.50). It was a tough choice actually, but in the end I went with the Provencale. All of the mussels are served in big pots with frites and mayonnaise.

I didn't have high hopes for the mussels, but they were great. Tasty, plenty of mussels and the frites were excellent - chunky, crunchy and served with addictive mayonnaise. I'd rather eat a pot of these mussels any day over many of the overpriced $30 main courses which are unfortunately now the staples of far too many CBD eateries. Between the mussels and the frites, this was a pretty decent meal.

If you aren't a big fan of seafood, there are of course other options, including pork and fennel sausages with mash ($24.50), eye fillet ($35), chicken breast ($30), oven baked barramundi ($34) or the basil & pumpkin risotto with seared scallops ($24.50). One of my friends had the risotto with scallops, which also looked appetising.

If you are still hungry after your mussels, frites and beer, there are also a few desserts, including of course a Belgian dark chocolate mousse ($13). Unfortunately we had to get back to work, so a long afternoon in the bar was out of the question.

Service was acceptable, but not particularly friendly. Our waiter appeared to have more pressing things on his mind than our table. Still, everything came out without any dramas, so the were no problems there.

As I only had one meal here, I won't be listing out the usual ratings. But if you're looking for a good pot of mussels, or even just some excellent frites to munch away on next time you are having a few beers, then give the Belgian Beer Cafe Brussels a try.

What does all this mean? A good spot for lunch if you stick with the Belgian specialties - mussels, beer and frites.

Belgian Beer Cafe Brussels
Corner of Mary & Edward Streets
Brisbane 4000
P - 07 3221 0199
W - http://www.belgianbeercafebrussels.com.au/

Sustainable Seafood Guide

The December issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller has an interview with Tim Winton about sustainable seafood, which makes for interesting reading. The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) has published Australia's Sustainable Seafood Guide. According to the AMCS's website, it's the first national guide to choosing sustainable seafood. The guide lists those species which are overfished and which we all should avoid buying or eating.

The Sustainable Seafood Guide only costs $9.95 and you can order a copy from the AMCS's website here. It also comes with a handy pocket guide to take with you on your next shopping expedition. There is plenty of other information about the AMCS on their website, if you want to find out exactly what it is they do.