What if you take Coffee Anthology’s precise eye for the black stuff – a focus that has made it a yardstick for specialty coffee in Brisbane’s CBD – and apply it to food? The answer is Fika, Anthology owner Adam Wang’s new breakfast and lunch eatery, which has finally opened inside Midtown Centre on Charlotte Street.

Fika is the latest outlet at Intersection, Wang’s classy food and beverage precinct, which includes a new home for Coffee Anthology that opened at the start of the year; a CBD instalment of cult Upper Mount Gravatt patisserie The Whisk, which began trading two weeks ago alongside Fika; and a soon-to-open guest roaster bar.

“I take an interest in everything,” Wang says. “I like good food. I don’t drink alcohol but if you give me nice alcohol, I’m more than happy to try it and taste it with you, to enjoy it. I don’t say no to things.”

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Fika – along with The Whisk – sits high inside Intersection’s 700-square-metre indoor “laneway”, which runs from Charlotte Street through to Mary Street. Breeze past Anthology’s coffee bar, climb a few steps and you essentially walk into its dining room – a place of brick walls, strong concrete features, comfy leather booths and plenty of greenery.

For food, chef Eugene Lee has combined European and Asian techniques to create a sophisticated, keenly priced breakfast and lunch menu. In the morning you might order coronation scrambled eggs on toast served with smashed cucumber; jjajang baked beans with chorizo and a fried egg; and avo on toast that includes mushed peas, fried enoki mushrooms and a citrus extra-virgin olive oil.

The lunch-leaning dishes include a variation on a niçoise that combines torched tuna with green beans, potato and fried dough; a beef cheek kare-kare (a thick, caramel-coloured Filipino stew) with Chinese broccoli and Sichuan chilli oil; gnocchi served in a lamb goulash; and Thai-basil and chilli prawns with marinated pumpkin and bottarga.

“I think food shouldn’t be pocketed into certain labels,” Lee says. “Just because I do gnocchi, doesn’t mean it has to be overtly Italian … I don’t like labels in my personal life, and I think it makes sense to have that approach to my cooking as well.”

“Eugene’s put together a menu that’s different but not polarising,” Intersection general manager Pete Mitchell says. “We still have those [approachable] items. But it’s about customers feeling as if they can ask us, ‘Oh, what’s this? Because I like this.’ They can ask those questions, eat that food, and go, ‘Wow!’ It’s not just the coffee side, but also the food where the team can pass on that knowledge in a way that makes customers still feel welcome.”

For drinks, there’s Coffee Anthology’s usual terrific rotation of Australia’s best coffee roasters – think Padre, Proud Mary, Almanac and Passport – and a tight selection of craft beers and international wines by the bottle and glass.

The Whisk covers grab-and-go punters with award-winning pastry chef and owner Justin Yu’s imaginative selection of danishes and croissants, prepped and baked on-site. There are sour cherry, raspberry, caramel-pear and cinnamon-apple danishes, while croissant fillings range from almond and chocolate-almond to more unusual options such as house-made peanut butter, hotdog, spicy salami, and German sausage and caramelised onion.

Wang says it perhaps would’ve been easier for marketing purposes to launch Fika under the Coffee Anthology brand, but when you sit inside the completed Intersection (minus the guest roaster bar) his approach makes sense. This is a place you can engage with on your own terms, whether it’s to stop by Anthology for a coffee or The Whisk for pastries, or settle in at Fika with workmates and friends over brunch – or any mix of the three. On a busy day, it buzzes with a communal feel.

“Each of these brands sell themselves,” Mitchell says. “You want a coffee? You go to Anthology. You want to eat? There’s Fika. You want a pastry? There’s The Whisk. Each is a little bit separate from the other but all in that one area. There’s that opportunity to draw people in with one thing, and then they engage with everything else while they’re in here.”

Fika
155 Charlotte Street, Brisbane

Hours:
Daily 7.30am–2pm

intersectionfd.com.au