Three of the Best Dishes in Toowong (and Surrounds) for $20 or Less

This little suburb tucked under the arms of its bossier Paddington and Indooroopilly cousins, is quietly hard hitting on the gastronomic front with a plethora of fine eats for $20 or less. Roll up your sleeves, pull out a lobster-coloured note and get stuck in.

Salt beef roll, Josie North – $19

You can tell this was made with a glutton’s honed sensibility. Thick slices of pink meat the colour of a baby’s cheek, smears of the cafe’s own McNorth sauce in drip-down-your-arm quantities and crisp iceberg lettuce are hugged by slices of soft seeded bread doing its best to keep all that food in order. This is a sandwich with an understanding of what makes for a single, multi-textured mouthful. Followed by another and another, until only crumbs and a wistful desire for more remain.

French onion soup, Haig Rd Bistro – $20

Beware the siren call of fashion and rebel with a bowl of old-school French onion soup. The bowl, teeming with slow-cooked onions and heady broth, is intense and luxurious. It’s the stuff of therapy: the good kind that leaves you feeling whole, centred and pleasantly overwhelmed by the intensity of flavours. To call this a soup would be reductive – this is liquified velvet. It’s adorned with crusty bread, caving in the middle, like an old mattress, from the weight of melted cheese. It’s a grand, fancy detour from France to the Brisbane suburbs.

Curried egg salad sanga with crispy shallots, Riser – $15

This is an egg sandwich for a new age. There’s the texture, which has both bite and softness, and the sweet-savoury depths that come when liberal spicing and protein meet in a way that is just so. The shallots give crunch, and the bread has the requisite trampoline-spring that only comes from a slow prove. This is the kind of sandwich that shouts love and nourishment as loudly as international football fans shout at the ref. It will leave you happily burping the rich aromatics of an entire spice cupboard and wondering why no one thought to add fried shallots to a sandwich a good decade earlier.