If you need to eat while you shop, Garden City is the spot.
Will any Brisbane shopping centre ever top Garden City for food? Probably not. And will anyone ever stop calling it Garden City? Again, probably not. The atrium at the top of the escalators at the north-western end of the centre is as good as any place to start. Here, your Oportos, McDonalds and KFCs sit alongside operators such as 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle, with its unctuous, spicy bowls of hand-pulled Chinese noods; New Shanghai and its lengthy menu of house-made dim sum; and Hokkaido, with its perfectly flaked baked cheese tarts.
Wander down one of the halls to the outside dining precinct and you could eat at Betty’s, Vapiano or Nando’s, or get classy yum cha at Yum Cha Cuisine, killer Malaysian (including one of the best char kway teows in town) at Ya Hoo Kitchen, or well-pitched sushi at Sushi Edo.
And then there’s 8 Street Asian food precinct, a charming facsimile of the kind of food alley you might find in Bangkok or Hong Kong. Here, there’s a bunch of hole-in-the-wall vendors serving malatang, chongqing noodles, ramen, bibimbap and more.
Scattered about other parts of the centre are a Hakataya Ramen, a Foster & Black and a David’s Master Pot malatang joint. If you need to eat while you shop, Garden City is the spot.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
