Fish Lane restaurant named Brisbane’s most underrated laneway eatery

Forgive me Hello Please for I have sinned. It’s been five years since my last visit.

Look, maybe I’m being hard on myself. There are so many eye-catching restaurants in Fish Lane – Julius, Southside, Marlowe, Clarence – let alone the rest of the city, that a gap between meals is understandable.

But then it’s not. Part of the reason you don’t return to a restaurant like this as often as you should is because, perhaps perversely, you know it’s good.

But, how good? Because I think I’d forgotten Hello Please is this good.

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My dining partner and I rolled up on a Wednesday night and ordered six dishes. All were tasty, interesting and, taken together, exhibited stacks of technique. Some were evolutions or flips of dishes chef Jesse Stevens has been cooking for a decade now (the restaurant just celebrated its 10th birthday), others were newer creations.

Take the fried chicken. The dish once used the rib of the bird, which, when cooked properly, is a brilliant way to eat chook – perhaps my favourite. These days, it’s thigh, but Stevens refuses to miss – his crumb is that good, the chicken, brined overnight, that tender. A tangy flourish of pickled daikon and the extra umami of dried betel leaf pushes the whole thing to that specific kind of affection we reserve for the most elevated dude foods. I used to rate this the best fried bird in town. Ten years on, it’s still right up there.

It’s a similar story with snapper served with a yellow curry, curry leaf and crispy noodles. This is a flip on a barramundi Thai red curry the restaurant did in its early days. Back then, the fish was steamed; currently, it’s finished on the barbecue, skin on, then added to the curry before hitting the table. Stevens says the dish changes as he rotates proteins around the different sections of the kitchen, but I like this take — it works well with Hello Please’s street-food DNA, the char of the fish a lovely offset to the fragrant curry and the neat textural touch of the noodles and curry leaf.

Prawn toast is a little overplayed around town these days, but at Hello Please Stevens has cleverly evolved their early version into a toastie, which keeps the mousse thick and juicy while giving the outside a crisp, golden crunch. Served with a sprinkle of chives and a yuzu mayo, it’s an unctuous, textural delight.

The remainder of the dishes are new to me but, for the most part, they’re just as impressive and slot nicely into Stevens’ general approach of filtering East Asian and Southeast Asian dishes through an Australian lens.

Steamed bay lobster dumplings with fermented chilli butter add the same prawn mousse into their wrappers. This mix, typically made for frying, is instead steamed, lending the final result a plumpness of your favourite har gow. They burst as we bite into them, Stevens leaning on the quality of his protein by simply accompanying it with what basically amounts to a beurre blanc spiked with Hello Please’s in-house VHS (very hot sauce). They barely last a minute on the plate.

The only slight bummer during the initial dishes is a wok-fried green-bean side, which is a little ho-hum, but not enough to derail our meal.

Throughout, we pick over co-owner Maris Cook’s Euro-leaning wine list, with its thoughtful by-the-glass selections. We go for an energetic, racy picpoul blanc from Benjamin Darnault, and a crisp Max Mediterranee rose. Later, I drink a beautifully candied, textural Coteau de la Biche vouvray from Domaine Pichot. These are all killer wines and there’s a real sense of structured playfulness to the list – even if I’d ultimately prefer the vino poured at the table.

I laugh at the dessert menu, not because it seems disarmingly simple – a mille-feuille, a Basque cheesecake and a tiramisu – but because it’s Hello Please. It won’t be that simple.

We share the tiramisu and, sure enough, Stevens has filtered his take through the idea of a Vietnamese coffee, sweetening his mascarpone with condensed milk. There’s also a decent slug of rum in there, which purists might scoff about, given it perhaps overpowers the espresso. But we fight over it, the dessert luscious and luxuriant without being overpoweringly sweet.

Talking about service at Fish Lane restaurants is tricky. These places absolutely murder pre-theatre (one restaurateur who used to work at Julius says it could easily do five turns of the dining room on a busy night), and the floor staff need to stick the landing when those initial diners have cleared out. On our visit, some of the senior staff have been called away to a function, and while the team who look after us are friendly, the seams definitely show a couple of times.

It was enough for me to take a second look a few days later very early in a Saturday service, without a booking. I’m glad I did because the restaurant was nothing short of accommodating before what would have been a fully loaded evening. It also gave me a chance to try a few extra dishes: all were winners – particularly beef brisket with rolled rice noodles, which arrived at the table in a cloud of wok hei.

The digs themselves are completely different to the car-park-and-picnic-table setup that was the original Hello Please, before the space across Fish Lane was turned into the Town Square and Bar Brutus. But it’s no less charming, with that very redevelopment making for a neat outlook from the dining room – and it will soon evolve further, with the restaurant to migrate some of its tables to a new outside area next year.

I know plenty of locals who haven’t returned to Hello Please since those early days. And perhaps this review is for them as much as anyone who hasn’t experienced it at all.

Because you need to go back – we’re lucky to have such a well-realised slice of genuine hospitality in this city.

Atmosphere: Fast-paced Australian-inflected East and Southeast Asian street food in a moody laneway space.

Go-to dishes: Fried chicken with pickled daikon, barbecue snapper with Sri Lankan curry.

Drinks: A precisely curated Euro-leaning wine list, plus classic and signature cocktails.

Cost: About $210 for two, plus drinks.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

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