Please and thank you – Fish Lane’s Hello Please has launched a cracking brunch offering
Typically, when folks think of Hello Please, thoughts first turn to plates of tender chargrilled pork ribs, crispy sweet-corn fritters crowned with spanner crab and a dusting of togarashi, and steamy serves of Bay lobster dumplings bathing in fermented chilli butter. Soon, though, there’s a good chance fans of the Fish Lane stand-out will be raving about its ricotta hotcakes, potato rosti and scrambled eggs on toast with a side of thick-cut bacon from Rayner’s Meats. Hello Please is now opening earlier on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, serving a menu of crowd-pleasing chow alongside silky specialty coffee and brunch cocktails.
Yes, you read that correctly – Hello Please is doing brunch now. After a soft launch a couple of weeks ago, co-owners Maris Cook and head chef Jesse Stevens (both of whom also own Maeve Wine around the corner) are pressing accelerate on a Hello Please’s morning service, opening the restaurant’s doors at 10:00 am on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays for coffee and classic chow. The idea of adding morning-appropriate fare is something that the team has been kicking around for almost a year, noticing a gap between Fish Lane’s early morning coffee rush and its heaving lunchtime trade.
“It’s about offering something that the laneway doesn’t have yet,” says Maris, who is no stranger to brunch, being the former manager of sorely missed Woolloongabba breakfast icon Pearl Cafe. “We’ve got neighbours that serve Asian flavours, we’ve got a a busy pizzeria on the corner and we’ve got Maeve to think about as well. We didn’t want to pull clientele from one of those businesses already.”
So, how does a restaurant like Hello Please parlay its Southeast Asian inspirations into a brunch-style menu? Well, to put it simply, it doesn’t. Maris explains, “The plan was to hit that Bill Granger-style of brunch where everyone’s excited to come down, everything is quality and there’s nothing that will alienate you”.
Hello Please’s debut brunch menu, affectionately labelled as The Breakfast Club, is best described as classic and comfort inducing. It starts with basics like toast with spreads, Greek yoghurt with passionfruit curd and berries, and ham-and-salad sandwiches, before rolling into a clutch of larger plates. There are evergreen favourites like eggs on toast (poached, fried or scrambled – your pick), as well as ricotta hotcakes topped with Pepe Saya butter and lashings of maple syrup, corn fritters with avocado hummus and red pesto, and a potato rosti with poached eggs, creme fraiche and chives. Every item can be jazzed up with the addition of sides like LP’s parsley-and-pecorino pork sausage with Hello mustard, Good Growing oyster mushrooms swimming in herb butter, truss tomatoes roasted in rosemary oil, and fried saganaki with Maeve Wines’ fermented garlic honey and lemon.
Coffee is supplied by Allpress Espresso, with guests able to order everything from standard flat whites to affogatos. There’s also fresh citrus juice on offer, but those after a stiffer sip can opt for a mimosa, Aperol spritz, bloody Mary, espresso martini or caffe corretto.
At its core, Hello Please’s menu is all about nailing three of brunch’s holiest tenets – simplicity, quality and consistency. “[As a customer], if you make the best hotcake you can possibly make, I’m happy with what you’ve done and I’ll be back,” says Maris. “We used to do it at Pearl – there were things on the menu that people would come back for every week. That’s what we hope to become and to have an offering that has its own character and its own clientele.”
Though starting small, the crew has grand plans for Hello Please’s morning offering. Expect the team to add more sandwiches to the daytime menu, with Maris and Jessie already flipping through a mental Rolodex of ideas, including bolognese jaffles, a play on a bologna meatball sub and maybe even banh mis (a popular staple from Hello Please’s shipping-container days). There’s even talk of a bottomless brunch service, too.
“The menu’s only in its first instance, so things will come onto it that will maybe be more complex,” Maris reveals, “We’ve got a specials board in the front room and the back room for us to try out new flavours. We’ve already got a complex menu in the Hello Please offering where people step their boundaries a little bit – we’ll put bits and pieces of that on the board that are the most popular, so then everyone’s comfortable.”
Hello Please’s brunch is available now from 10:00 am on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, with a view towards expanding those hours into the working week further down the line.
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