First Look: Bellissimo Bulimba Has Been Reimagined for Nights as Besitos, a Beautiful Mediterranean-Inspired Share-Plate Restaurant

First there was Giorgina Venzin’s Darvella patisserie, and then her Southeast Asian restaurant, Melrose , which opened with former Longrain Melbourne chef Arte Assavakavinvong in the kitchen. After that it was Mina Italian from Salt Meats Cheese owners Stefano De Blasi and Edoardo Perlo, in partnership with Ross Ledingham and Mario Castro.

Now comes Besitos. Co-owner Mark Bignell will tell you this new night-time dining concept at Bellissimo Coffee’s Bulimba outpost is helping elevate the food and drink scene at the river end of Oxford Street. Really, though, when considered along with its slick neighbours, Besitos is part of an entire step change for the suburb’s nightlife, which in the past has sometimes lacked more refined dining options.

It might be last to the party, but Besitos has been years in the making. The Bulimba Bellissimo has always closed late in the day, at 6pm, and Bignell, co-owner Michael Koo and their team used to watch as diners flooded into the suburb just as they were heading home for the night.

“There would be a traffic jam up Hawthorne Road, waiting to get onto Oxford Street,” Bignell says. “This area opens up to Cannon Hill, Murarrie and even Capalaba and that broader catchment, so it serves a lot of people.

“When we surveyed our customers, we realised that, despite the quality of Bulimba, there probably weren’t too many venues meeting their expectations. So we always felt like there was a gap in the market if we delivered at a high standard but kept it as a place that was easy to go to.”

You can excuse Bignell and Koo for taking their time with Besitos. Over the past few years they’ve been preoccupied with the launch of their Coorparoo roastery and cafe on the one hand, and Joey’s, a Kangaroo Point cafe and restaurant, on the other. Then at the end of last year came the relaunch of the Bulimba premises – the site of their original roastery – as a slick all-day cafe. That refurbishment was always done with a transition to night service in mind, and Bignell and Koo approached it with some of the lessons learned from Joey’s.

“Stretching from 6am to late in the evening means you need a strong team to make it work,” Bignell says. “We also learned that more preparation and less haste to open is often better. That was opportunistic, because we’d just finished Joey’s as the AFL Grand Final came to town. We got absolutely slammed when we perhaps weren’t ready to go full tilt that soon.

“We reopened Bellissimo with just the day trade just to settle it back in, because we already had a big uplift in our customer base. So we didn’t want to open Besitos until we got that down pat.”

Bignell says it’s best to think of Besitos as an extended pop-up that will take over the Bellissimo Bulimba space from Thursday to Sunday. It certainly feels very different to the daytime trade. The pendant lights take over, candles are dotted around the place, and the focal point of the venue becomes the colour and activity of the open kitchen. The pace is deliberate, the vibe intimate – this feels like a restaurant, not a cafe.

Chef Marco Torrisi’s menu is split into small and large plates, all designed to share. From a lengthy list of smaller items, you might order emu tartare with cured egg yolk, chives and caper mayo; charred octopus with capsicum, olives, tomato and onion chutney; and twice-cooked cauliflower with garlic and herb crumbs and curry leaves. For the larger plates there are just the three options: handmade casarecce pasta with Canadian scallops, ‘nduja butter and parsley; chargrilled market fish with confit potato, asparagus and smoked tomato; and an Angus sirloin served with pickled shallots, jus and ‘nduja oil.

“We wanted to give Marco as much creative freedom as possible,” Bignell says. “But the idea is for the menu to be flexible – something that’s suitable for both special occasions and regular dining. But we always want to over-deliver on what we can achieve with the quality of the food we put on the plate.”

The drinks list includes an efficient but imaginative wine selection by award-winning sommelier (and Wineism co-owner) Ian Trinkle, a clutch of signature cocktails and classic cocktail variations (including shared cocktails), and local craft beers on tap.

“We’ve got an amazing customer base in Bulimba,” Bignell says. “We were really humbled after the refurb that everyone came back in. Now it’s a case of saying to them, ‘You trust us for great coffee in the morning. Now trust us to deliver you a topnotch dinner as well. Because there aren’t too many venues in Brisbane that can do that – go from exceptional coffee in the morning to a really memorable dinner at night. To us, that’s an exciting challenge.”

Besitos
35 Oxford Street, Bulimba
(07) 3899 6704

Hours:
Thu to Sun 5pm–Late

besitos.com.au