NOTE: Miu Coffee has been rebranded Royal Le Restaurant. Royal Le is a new sweet spot for Chirn Park locals. It’s a place where everyone is invited to gather, catch up over coffee or an interesting meal. The Gold Coast is made up of many communities, each with their own distinct vibe. Locals eat, drink...

Hazel Nguyen’s eponymous café, Hazel Espresso, is a place of passion. Named after Hazel by her partner and co-owner, Long Tran, Hazel Espresso is dedicated to a fusion of cultures, flavours and colours. In fact, that’s exactly what gets our attention. Having left their jobs as hospitality managers in Melbourne, Hazel and Long have opened...

Can you remember when the epitome of a great healthy lunch was a salad sandwich? It was made to order from the deli bar of corner stores, where stainless steel containers of lettuce, tomato, cucumber and beetroot sat waiting in readiness for the next order. Ham, chicken and cheese were optional. Beetroot was a given...

To those who think that you need a prime location on the Gold Coast for your café to succeed, think again! Cubby Bake House has an ‘out of the box’ location in the Tweed Valley. To put it mildly, Chinderah is hardly the place for ‘walk by’ traffic. “The growth of Cubby Bakehouse has been...

When Thao and Vien Nguyen took over Can Tho Kitchen from Thao’s mother in 2014, they transformed the Runaway Bay restaurant into a colourful eatery and bar. Its walls told the story of a family’s migration from Vietnam to Australia. Five years of success further on, the couple have opened a second, far more intimate...

If you visit Quan 55 in search of a traditional Vietnamese restaurant, you might just be disappointed. Quan 55 is all that and more. Wynn Huynh, who owns Quan 55 with her husband Thanh Tram, is the first to tell us that she has never felt confined by expectations. So, you should expect the unexpected!...

Hidden away behind a rather bland concrete-rendered façade, Hideaway Kitchen & Bar is the latest addition to the Gold Coast’s Asian street food scene. It’s the dark backstreets of Asia that co-owner Scott Imlach visits in his latest restaurant; those shady alleys with overhanging awnings and neon sign lit dodgy bars, with hawker food carts...

“Good morning, Vietnam!” Jimmy Wah’s brings a huge smile to our face. Not only is it a sideways nod to the local GI bar in the 1987 movie Good Morning, Vietnam, but its combination of talented owners – Jake Cooley, highly regarded former head chef of Social Eating House + Bar and Shelly Greaves, former...

“Memories framed on the wall last a lifetime in our hearts.” I’m really interested in the concept of others being ‘observers’ of our lives. Our close friends and family, who have known us for a long time, understand the hurdles we’ve vaulted or staggered over. They do not judge us at face value, but know...

Pho. My eyes roll back, my nostrils flare, as I remember dusky evenings in Hanoi, food carts parked on street corners, diners sitting on crates, steaming bowls of soup propped in their laps. It’s hard to describe the layers of meaning in a good pho, achieved by hours of stewing and skimming beef flank, reusing...