Good food down under
Tim Heald goes to Brisbane and discovers an excellent chef with a smart city attached The question has, over the last few years, been persistent and the answer elusive. Bruno Loubet was a successful chef in London during the 1990s. He belonged to the period just before the celebrity of cooks such as Gordon Ramsay and Rick Stein, but came from the era which spawned men like Marco Pierre White. For a time Loubet ran a well-known eponymous restaurant in Soho. He also created a signature restaurant at one of the smart international hotels in Park Lane. He won Michelin stars for his culinary skills, which was then, in London, a rare occurrence.
I had another reason for being aware of Bruno which was that he and his wife Catherine were parents at St Mary Magdalen's Roman Catholic Primary School in Mortlake, south-west London, where my own children were being educated. Mine were younger than the Loubet children, but I remember him cooking for a Mary Mags charity event at the London Welsh rugby ground and also doing smart sausages for a fête one soggy day on Richmond Green. He was a local hero and nationally he possessed what one might call `gastro-clout'.
Then he vanished.
People do, of course. One thinks of the Labour MP John Stonehouse, who staged his own suicide but turned up later safe and well. And Lord Lucan, who didn't. Occasionally Mortlake veterans would ask vaguely if anything had been heard of the Loubets and we would all shake our heads. Sometimes the question would be asked more querulously on one of those erudite websites devoted to gastronomy such as 'Opinionated About'.
Whatever happened to Bruno Loubet?
The short answer is that he is still cookBruno ing up a storm but has, for the last few years, been doing so down under. Not in the smart restaurant world of Sydney or Melbourne, nor even the less well-known but still exciting culinary world of Adelaide or Hobart, but in Queensland, which is still associated, even by other Australians, very unfairly with steak and eggs, year-round barbies and perhaps, at a pinch, the Morton Bay Bug. For a while he was chef in a waterside restaurant at the resort of Noosa to the north of the city, but the Loubets decided after a couple of years that they were after all, big city people, and moved back to Brisbane. This is a city which has a population of more or less two million He now cooks at a place called the Baguette in Ascot, a chic Brisbane suburb. This restaurant, run by a fellow Frenchman from Perpignan, opened 20 years ago.
My wife and I ate there the other night. Bruno's picture is on the wall outside, together with a blurb about his Michelin stars. The food was delicious and the couple seemed well and happy. They recently took out Australian citizenship and seemed quite dewy-eyed about it. Their children have also become Australian.
I mention all this partly to clear up one of Loubet life's little mysteries, but also to pinpoint an interesting fact, little appreciated by Poms, even those who read The Spectator. Australia, even good old rednecked Queensland, is now the sort of country where a Michelin-starred AngloFrench chef can move to and flourish almost unnoticed and evidently unremarked.
I am not saying I like everything about Brisbane — I certainly didn't like their handling of the recent arrest of an Indian Muslim doctor in connection with the UK bomb plot. Nevertheless, it has a spectacular river running through its centre with an impressive cast of high-speed ferries dancing along it; it has a fine cultural complex on the south bank, even though I don't much care for the depressingly unbookish new State Library in the middle. On the other hand, I really like the modern art gallery next door, which has only been open for about a year and which contains some terrific native art as well as a wondrous representation of a life-size dying elephant and great views of the city skyline. The night after Baguette, we enjoyed a more greasy-spoon sort of meal at a café in Chinatown, where we had jellyfish and bean curd as good as I've had in Soho and Hong Kong.
I travelled to the city by train from Sydney, which is another story, but at least they're working on improvements to the Roma Street Station. From the outside, I much like the look of the vaunted Gabba sports stadium. And so on.
In short, Brisbane is a smart city and it even has Bruno Loubet. Enjoy.
AL1DA CAMPBELL Baguette Restaurant, tel. 00617 3268 6168 (www.baguette.com.au). Tim Heald stayed at the Emporium Hotel, tel. 00617 3253 6999 (www. emporiumhotelcom.au). He flew to Sydney with Qantas and then travelled by CounttyLink XPT train from Sydney to Brisbane. For details contact Tourism Australia.
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