The Foraging Quail

You know how at some places the food is almost too beautiful to eat? This is one of those places. Make sure you do eat it, though, because it the food is exquisite. With a few different degustation-​style options on offer, a great wine list and a low key New Farm location, the Foraging Quail should be up there with your favourite fine dining restaurants in Brisbane.

The Foraging Quail is a degustation-​only restaurant with 3 choices:
— 5 courses (chosen out of ~10 options) for $ 65
— 8 courses (chef’s menu) for $ 95 (with matching wines for $ 145)
— a vegetarian 8 course degustation menu
The 5 course menu has no cheese or wine options so if you add that separately you’ll get pretty close in price to the full degustation. Added ‘complexity’ (1^st-​world problem, I know) is that you need to agree with your dining partners on the 5 choices. So, with our group we took the easy way out and settled on the 8-​course.
All dishes (except desert) are brought out on sharing plates, making for an interesting tapas-​like experience. The small personal plates are swapped out after every second course.
Courses were creative, nicely presented, and very tasty. Most courses have some very unique components that melt in your mouth, look unusual, and/​or are (probably) very hard to make. Standouts courses for me were the braised pork belly, and the desert. The quail was also great.
We weren’t excited about everything. For example, the lamb belly wasn’t very memorable and we had some grates in the fish. We were the last diners left and the cleaning up that happened over our last two dishes was quite noticeable (open kitchen).
A major draw of this restaurant is the wine list. The sommelier has put together a great list and even the less expensive wines are great (ours averaged $ 50/​bottle). The red ones are presented in light– medium– heavy-​bodied groupings. With our group of 5, we shared a Pinot, Temperanillo-​Grenache, and a Cab-​Shiraz and all were really good.

I wrote this only able to describe the chef’s menu on opening night, but it was flawless.
Absolutely impeccable, the food was amazing.
We had eight dishes but three stood out, the heirloom tomatoes, the slow cooked octopus and the mussels. Keep working on the quail. It’s not there yet but it has promise!
Big kudos to the sommelier also. I don’t know much about matching wine to food. I’m more of your street food guy, but he does. Each wine just matched perfectly with each dish. All in all, amazing, fantastic place.
Great date spot too.