Supabad Kitchen is pairing Asian flavours and native-Australian ingredients for a new pop-up series
Brisbane’s underground food scene is percolating right now. If you’re not sure what we mean when we say ‘underground’, we’re talking about ephemeral epicurean concepts – the ‘good time, not a long time’ happenings organised by emerging talents. Brisbane has a healthy pop-up scene going at the moment, but soon it’ll get a little bit bigger with the debut of Supabad Kitchen, a new culinary concept from a couple of young-gun chefs.
Chris Bateman and Zane Schnitzerling are the brains behind the Superbad brand. The Brisbane-born chefs go way back, first connecting during their apprenticeships before skipping overseas to cook in Japan, where Chris worked in private dining in Niskeo and at a few Tokyo izakays, and where Zane spent more than a year at the Tokyo American Club. When both chefs returned to Brisbane, they decided to take an unconventional next step in their careers, teaming up to launch a pop-up that mixed their tastes and talents.
“As soon as I got back to Brisbane we started thinking to ourselves, ‘Oh, we should really do something together’,” recalls Chris, who also spent a few years in Hong Kong. “We work well together and we’re good mates – we’ve got some similar experiences in cooking, but also some different experiences. I think that helps us in terms of coming together and making dishes.”
Superbad Kitchen sees Chris and Zane pushing their affinity for Asian cuisine further, creating custom menus for both private-dining events and publicly accessible pop-ups at venues around town. The first is taking place on Saturday September 14 at Coorparoo coffee spot Straits from 4:00 pm to late.
“We’re just drawing on our experiences from where we’ve been – so there’s a lot of Asian-inspired food,” Chris tells us. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be Asian inspired, but I think – given our experiences – we’re probably heading down that path a lot more. We have been working in fine dining, but I feel like it’s more fun and approachable – it’s a little bit more easy to understand.”
While Japanese flavours will shine on Supabad’s menus, the duo is also looking to cultivate a rep for using a swathe of native-Australian ingredients, which Chris has access to through his work with Indigenous catering business FigJam and Co.
“We have the ability to get a whole bunch of native-Australian ingredients from all over Australia, like Davidson’s plum, satinash, water apples, pigface and purslane,” Chris tells us. “That’s going to be a key element into who we are as Superbad – we really want to use the native ingredients as much as possible.”
Supabad’s pop-up at Straits will see the duo dish up a tight menu featuring the likes of potato salad with wattleseed, egg and shallots, native wagyu beef spring rolls with saltbush, kimchi and cheese, paperbark-smoked emu tataki with iceberg, shiitake, chilli and macadamia, and a pork katsu sando with yumyum sauce and lemon myrtle slaw. The event is BYO, so guests are encouraged to bring along a drop to enjoy alongside the punchy, small-plate fare.
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“[At Straits] we were doing a menu that’s kind of a bit more like snacky and not like a dinner, it’s more like a wine bar menu,” Chris tells us. “I think that’s a good representation of what we want to do for our pop-ups – we just cater them to the venue. It could be a wine bar or it could be a street-food snack place, but down the road I think we definitely want to have a bricks-and-mortar place.”
In between pop-up appearances, Chris and Zane will be taking Supabad to home kitchens across Brisbane, offering a range of options for private events – be it a special intimate occasion or a fancy soiree – with canape-style and set-menu options available.