Gauge is Jerome Batten’s second venue, building from his well-loved Sourced Grocer in Newstead. While the latter captures a produce store and café in one brief, Gauge dabbles in weekend breakfast/bunch trade, but is perhaps best known for its two, three and seven course dinner offerings. Batten opened Gauge in 2015 with chef Cormac Bradfield as his business partner, who was joined at the pass by head chef Phil Marchant.
While the brunch menu looks to walk down some familiar roads, it does so in a playful and inventive way, with everything lovingly house made. Take for example their ‘bacon sanga’, smothered with house-made barbecue sauce and wrapped in similarly proprietorial sourdough bread. Avocado on toast gets dressed up with barley and lentil miso, and black lemon, while a sourdough waffle is crowned with celeriac ice cream.
Dinner is certainly a more elevated affair, but the same attention to detail is felt at both ends of the day. The dishes are inventive and modern, employing an eclectic range of ingredients, without supplying to a particular style. Native ingredients feature at times, as do Japanese staples, modern favourites, like black garlic and all manner of ferments, get a run, but this is individual cooking at its core, deceptively simple but bold and inventive. The ingredients are sourced locally from small independent producers and are overwhelmingly seasonal.
The wine list very much reflects the sourcing ethos of the kitchen, and bends to what is being cooked. The wine producers they work with are typically local and have a hands-on approach to growing and a hands-off approach to bringing their wine to bottle. The offer shifts and changes according to what Bradfield and Marchant are cooking, with both the bottle and by-the-glass lists changing weekly.
Until he opened La Lune Wine Co, chef Paul Mc Givern was perhaps best known for his exploits on the fine dining scene, notably at East Brisbane’s The Wolfe, which achieved its fair share of critical acclaim. And though McGivern again pushed into that sphere with Corella (now closed), the equation that underpins La Lune…
It would be easy to be absorbed by brilliant tapas and paella across a vast menu of Catalan and Basque specialties while drinking excellent cocktails, but don’t forget to investigate the wine list, which is crammed with thoughtful and exciting selections, from the humble to the grand.
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