C'est Bon

You step in off Stanley Street and the traffic stops mattering. It is a brick shop row from another century, and inside the floors are uneven, the ceilings are lower than you expect and the doors stick. None of that has been installed. It is just what happens to a building that has been in use for a very long time.

The food is French and unembarrassed about it. Terrines, snails, duck, things finished in front of you, sauces that somebody stood over. Crepes in the morning made from buckwheat flour brought in from France. It is not a modern Australian menu with French accents; it is the other thing.

The cheese and the charcuterie are handled the way they are in France, which is to say seriously and without ceremony. The wine is the spine of the place — there is a full page of magnums served by the glass, which is the sort of thing that only happens when somebody in the building actually cares.

There are several rooms and they are genuinely different. The cellar downstairs is low and brick and lined with bottles, quiet enough to hear the person opposite you breathe. The rooftop is open air with the Gabba lights behind you. The restaurant proper sits between the two.

Mornings are the underrated version. Coffee and something pastry-shaped at a corner table with the light coming in sideways, watching Stanley Street without being part of it. The room is half empty and the whole building feels different at that hour.

Dinner is long. Not slow in the irritating sense, long in the sense that you will look up and two and a half hours will be gone, and the last hour will have been the best of it.

Stepping back out at eleven at night you are on a corner of old shopfronts with cranes standing over them. It is the kind of street that makes you look up on the way to the car.