It’s been funded by an award-winning beef producer, and features a 1-tonne dinner table. Here’s a peek inside.
Diners regularly argue about the best steak restaurant in Brisbane. Are you a Fatcow fan? Or are you an SK Steak and Oyster booster? Or perhaps you’re more inclined towards Walters down on Alice Street opposite the City Botanic Gardens?
Moo Moo The Wine Bar and Grill has been around longer than any of them. Set inside the heritage-listed Port Office Building in front of the Stamford Hotel, it’s quietly been going about its business since 2010, table by table, plate by plate.
“There are obviously always those new hotspots,” Moo Moo exec chef Trent Robson says, “but we have a really large loyal base, whether that’s in Brisbane or our Broadbeach venue. We’re not going anywhere.”
Instead Moo Moo is doubling down, reopening one of its private dining spaces after an eye-watering $300,0000 renovation.
Opening Tuesday, May 5 and funded by North Queensland’s award-winning King River, one of Moo Moo’s key beef suppliers, the 18-seat dining room has been named, appropriately enough, the King River Room.
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“I think that competition probably motivates us to do things like the King River Room, or at least double check that what we’re doing, we’re doing with confidence.
“We support a lot of different breeders, just like they do us,” Robson says, “and this is probably one of the first collaborations of its nature between a restaurant and a breeding brand … We wanted to do something a little bit different because we have a similar, family-driven ethos, which is exciting.”
Brisbane design firm Studio Collective has overseen the conversion of one of the restaurant’s private spaces into a moody 18-seat dining room, adjoining lounge and balcony overlooking Edward Street. It’s a dark treatment, big on texture, with pride of place taken by an enormous dining table shaped from more than a tonne of marble.
“I was there when they carried it in,” Robson says, laughing. “It took six or seven fairly hefty blokes – on each corner.”
For food, Moo Moo’s broad menu of entrees, charcuterie, mains and specialty steaks will be backed by special King River cuts exclusive to the room.
“Those relationships with suppliers are so important to us and this is probably the ultimate expression of that,” Robson says. “King River has that traceability. You know what you’re dealing with and that, for a chef, is key. There’s a lot of professionalism there but also a lot of passion.”
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.
