Ginga

www.gingarestaurant.com.au

Having Mondays off work, we are sometimes hard-pressed to find somewhere open on a Monday evening to go out for dinner. Throw in a sister who ONLY wants Japanese and the Christmas period and its even more difficult. The only place we thought of was Ginga at South Brisbane. 

We walked around the various restaurants first, and noted with interest there’s a new Japanese place at the performing arts centre end of the restaurant area at Little Stanley/Grey Sts. There was absolutely no one in there though which wasn’t promising, and they didn’t have any salmon sashimi on the menu (another thing little sis was after) so we headed back down to Ginga.

The Rare Pear

www.therarepear.com.au

We’ve visited the Rare Pear at Holland Park for breakfast several times now, but have not been for lunch up until today. Their breakfast menu is fantastic with more than the usual fare, offering things like breakfast bruschetta with tomatoes, asparagus and fetta, French brioche toast, and corn fritters with apple balsamic glaze and chilli jam.

Today we visited for lunch, and found it was fairly busy even on a Monday. It seems a popular place for “ladies who lunch”, as well as for all the local business people. 

The Rare Pear is situated on busy Logan Road, and has an outdoor eating area with only a few tables indoors. There is a large display cabinet offering most of the lunch choices – quiches, pies, wraps, sandwiches, and savoury crepes. Other offerings on the menu include a steak sandwich, savoury mince on corn dough bread and a haloumi open grill. 

Beccofino

www.beccofino.com.au

Last night we had a pre-Christmas gathering with friends at Beccofino at Newstead. I was very keen to go there once I had learnt that was our venue of choice, as I have heard about their amazing pizzas. I was also so in the mood for pizza, having had a very asian themed week with regards to food, I needed some serious carbs. I had also just had a hugenormous workout at the gym so didn't feel nervous about all the pizza calories.

We ordered a couple of bottles of Catalina Sounds Sauvignon Blanc between the 5 of us ($43 per bottle), then decided we would just order 5 pizzas between us to share. I think it might have been a bit presumptuous to think we would all eat a pizza each (the boys would have no troubles but I was a bit worried about us girls), however we definitely wanted to sample a wide range of their pizzas.

Beccofino have two lists; pizza rosse (with their tomato sauce base) and pizza bianche (no sauce base). They also have a range of entrees, mains and pastas but I didn’t really even get beyond the pizza part of the menu to tell you the truth, as soon as I read the list of pizzas I developed a huge creepy smile on my face in anticipation.

The Euro

www.urbanerestaurant.com/the-euro/

It was my birthday last week and I decided to treat myself by convincing L to book us in for dinner at The Euro. We pretty much never go out in the city for dinner and after driving around a few blocks looking for a park, we passed a few interesting looking restaurants and so I’ve decided we need to expand our horizons and try a few of these city options in future.

The Euro is situated right next door to its more expensive sister restaurant Urbane. So we treated ourselves to dinner, but we didn’t TREAT ourselves to dinner! Dinner at Urbane probably requires a more special occasion than my birthday!

Thats certainly not to say The Euro is the ugly stepsister to Urbanes Cinderella. The Euro has a quite impressive menu and a stylish interior. Inside, its a long narrow restaurant with dining areas at the front and rear, separated by a bar area. The ceiling has interesting fluoro red and yellow coloured light fixtures which looked really cool. Unfortunately because of the dark lighting throughout the restaurant and of course me feeling self conscious with the camera as usual, I didn’t take any photos of the interior. All the photos that follow in this post are really dark, sorry!