Indian-Mexican tacos, chips cooked in beef fat and fire for everything: This East Perth brewpub gets it right

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You’ll find Brown Street Grill inside Bright Tank Brewery Co, an urban microbrewery that opened in 2018. (After dark, a turquoise neon light helps the hungry and thirsty pick out the space among the Brown Street traffic.) Although Bright Tank served food from day one, it wasn’t until 2021 that Stuart Laws (a Carnarvon-born chef and TV presenter who oversees the menus at an armful of pubs and dining rooms in the metro area) and his wife Phoebe entered the picture, taking over and making over the existing kitchen by installing a dark green Messiano wood-fired oven and a charcoal- and wood-burning grill modelled on a South African-style braai. Other than baking things in an oven, all the cooking in the semi-open kitchen involves harnessing fire in some way.

If you wanted to draw a line connecting Brown Street Grill and Bright Tank, you could argue that this open-fire set-up is simply Laws, his French-born head chef Jeremy Rayssac and their teams presenting their vision of the more modern Aussie barbecue. Yes, there will always be beers in the esky, but there’ll also be good wine plus a budding bartender in the kitchen making cocktails and mixed drinks. And as much as we love rissoles, snags and chops, even the most casual of barbecue wranglers knows and understands that, nowadays, we’ve come a long way from the contents of the classic barbecue pack.

They’ll know that, in the Xinjiang autonomous region along China’s northwest border, Uyghur cooks liberally season skewers of lamb with cumin ($18) before grilling them over fire until nicely charred and dizzy with smoke. The skewers arrive at the table two to a plate and slicked with a tongue-numbing house chilli oil fizzing with Sichuan peppercorns, pickled cucumbers and a promise to yourself to explore regional Chinese cooking beyond the ubiquitous Cantonese options.

They also know that slowly braising bone-in pork shoulders in a hot-ish oven, then shredding the meat and allowing it to steep in the pork’s braising liquid is a surefire way to make friends in the Americas. How many weekend grill warriors, however, would think to make a fragrant, cardamom-heavy vindaloo curry paste base, combine it with the pork, then serve this juicy, drippy mess in wonderful tortillas produced by the corn whisperers at La Tortilla? I’m pretty certain that this is the first time I’ve eaten Indian-Mexican tacos (three for $21). If future cross-cultural mash-ups are this delicious, I hope it won’t be the last.

Although the Bright Tank space adheres to many of the unwritten rules governing the brewpub genre – think strong retail offering, stainless steel tanks as design features plus colourful, urban branding – Brown Street Grill is no garden-variety brewpub kitchen serving the easy wins from the pub grub playbook. Instead, think of it a restaurant that happens to be inside a pub. A restaurant, admittedly, that also does terrific renditions of those old favourites.

The suppleness of the very serviceable woodfired pizzas (from $19) reminds me of a Neapolitan-style pizza, although I’d describe the crusts as nicely risen rather than hugely puffy. These are the sort of pizzas designed to be eaten fairly soon after leaving the oven, preferably after the molten cheese and wet – but not too wet – sugo have piped down. Diameter-wise, they sit at the smaller end of size spectrum: most adults should be able to polish off one on their own.

I’m into the burger ($24) too: a hefty jaw-tester centred around a juicy chuck and brisket Angus beef patty. Designed along fairly classical lines – there’s also lettuce, tomato, rings of onion and plastic, high-melt American cheese whose only job is to provide mouthfeel – it calls to mind a halcyon era when the burgers at a certain fast-food chain were better because they were flame-grilled in store.

Bonus points, too for the burger coming with chips as standard rather than having to be ordered (and paid for) separately. This feels especially good considering the burger’s price point, plus the fact that said chips are thick, wrinkly wedges cut from Prince of Orange potatoes and roasted in a heroic amount of wagyu beef fat ($15 as a side). If you ask nicely, likeable staff will bring you a little saucer with the smoked tomato ketchup used in the burger for all-important dipping purposes.

Let’s also file Brown Street’s woodfired bread ($19) under tasty-bread-things-you-shouldn’t-miss, not least because the dense, pide-ish (“Turkish bread”) bread comes with a twinkle-toed roast pumpkin and lentil dip jazzed up with harissa spice. If you’re a serial sauce-mopper like me, you’ll run out of bread before the dip, but no biggie: the dip is just as gratifying eaten with a spoon. Roasted Japanese pumpkin arranged atop a lush, mild green curry-esque Khmer curry ($23) booms with sweetness. It – and the other three wood-fired veg dishes on the menu – is yet another reminder to home cooks that vegetables and fire are great mates.

Still, there’s no denying that, at least in Australia, seafood and meat are synonymous with barbecue cooking. So it’s no surprise to spy Abrolhos octopus ($32) on offer, although I am caught off-guard by how well a base of thick, tangy labneh works as both a sauce to the occy and a foil to the richness of the chorizo-braised black lentils it’s served with.

A bone-in sirloin from a grass-fed (yes!) Dandaragan cow ($55) served with a green peppercorn and brandy sauce is one of two steak options. We asked for it rare and got it rare, although I felt the char on the beef was edging into the realms of acrid. (My dining partner, however, thought our steak’s char levels were fine.) The thin parts of the octopus had a similar burnt flavour. Peeking into the kitchen and watching chefs cook steaks on a fixed-shelf grill, it looked like the meat was being not gently licked but engulfed by flames – a problem usually caused by flare-ups when fat hits the fire. Constantly moving meat around a grill to cooler spots is one way to avoid burning your protein, as is using an adjustable grill set-up such as the one used at open-fire kitchens such as Singapore’s Michelin-starred Burnt Ends run by Perth-born Dave Pynt. Having said that, a meal where your only issue is extra-crusty steak rates as a good night out in pretty much any language.

Brown Street Grill, like WA’s growing number of restaurants focused on playing with fire, occupies an interesting space in the grill metaverse. It’s not quite the big-night-out excess and expense of, say, Rockpool Bar & Grill or 6Head, yet it’s also a couple of steps above cold, waxy lamb chops at Robbo’s on a Sunday arvo. Rather, it sits and grills somewhere in the middle with a smart-casual, mid-range offering that’s as suited to group catch-ups (absolutely book when coming with groups) as it is for dropping in before or after the footy for a pint and some pizza, then carrying on your way, perhaps with a four-pack of something for the fridge. It’s a style of eating and drinking many people in Western Australia have long appreciated.