Dark Shepherd, the moody new lamb house from Tassis Group, opens at The Star Brisbane
Just when you thought the high-profile restaurant openings had died down for the year, one of Brisbane’s busiest hospitality groups drops two new dining spots on us. The team behind Longwang, Opa Bar + Mezze and Rich & Rare has just opened Dark Shepherd at The Star Brisbane – a sleek and chic restaurant with Mediterranean influences that’s shining a light on the ‘wagyu of lamb’. The restaurant has arrived just days before the team opens another venue next door – take a look inside …
The festive period is one of the busiest times on the foodie calendar. Between Christmas parties, Friendsmas celebrations and the urge to splurge that goes hand-in-hand with the end-of-year period, it’s a great time to dine. But is it a great time to open a restaurant? It can be, if you ask Michael Tassis, but you have to have your ducks in a row.
“Early December is probably the most challenging time to open a venue,” admits Michael Tassis. “You have to be quite ready this time of the year to open a restaurant.”
But Michael isn’t opening just one restaurant this month. He’s opening two. Last Friday, the restaurateur pulled back the curtain on Dark Shepherd, a chic and atmospheric Mediterranean-inspired restaurant with lamb as its anchor protein. This week he’s also launching Pompette, a fetching French-inspired restaurant with its own champagne and oyster bar. Both eateries reside on The Terrace, the river-facing dining promenade on level four of The Star Brisbane at Queen’s Wharf – one of the most high-profile developments to arrive in Brisbane in recent memory.
That’s not all – Tassis Group is also putting finishing touches on two more concepts on the other side of The City – Stilts and Mulga Bill’s, which will soon anchor the Alice Street end of the Kangaroo Point Bridge. Safe to say there’s a lot happening for Michael right now. But if there’s any chaos, it’s of the controlled kind. From all reports, Dark Shepherd’s opening weekend was an overwhelming success.
“From the very start, people have been wanting to get in – it’s been an extremely positive response,” says Michael. “We unfortunately had to turn some people away and we’ve had to cut back bookings, but the feedback’s been unreal.”
The frenzy surrounding Dark Shepherd’s opening shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The restaurant occupies a unique space amongst Tassis Group’s portfolio. It sees the restaurateur bridging familiar and unfamiliar, trying a few new things that will excite fans of his other restaurants, which include the likes of Longwang, Fatcow on James St and Fosh, to name only a few.
Aesthetically, Dark Shepherd sets itself apart from its siblings with its distinctly monochromatic colour scheme. Regular collaborator Clui Design has crafted a mysterious and sleek interior scheme that lives up to the restaurant’s name, with a palette of dark grey marbled tables, white marble benchtops, curved sandy beige booths, textured white walls and mirrored surfaces. A curved entryway (resembling a Shepherd’s crook) directs guests to Dark Shepherd’s dimly lit dining room, which is divided between sunken and elevated tiers. Next to the bar sits a ten-person private-dining area, while a number of tables are also spread across the exterior terrace. In true Tassis Group fashion, the restaurant is also equipped with plenty of live oyster and seafood tanks.
“We’ve taken no shortcuts – we went all in on it,” says Michael. “With the location positioned right in the centre, we thought it would be a good opportunity to do a dark feel. From an atmosphere point of view, I think we’ve nailed it.”
Conceptually, Michael describes Dark Shepherd as a lamb house. The moody restaurant is giving lamb the steakhouse treatment, putting the protein centre stage and surrounding it with a menu of Mediterranean-inspired morsels crafted by husband-and-wife team Vangjel and Dianna Jorgo. This talented tandem boasts experience at the likes of Brisbane’s Greek Club and Tassis Group’s riverside favourite, Opa Bar + Mezze.
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“Vangjel knows his lamb really well – he is probably the best person when it comes to cooking lamb,” says Michael. “So it’s more of a collaboration centred around elevating the menu to that extra step.”
Dark Shepherd’s centrepiece Shepherd menu is anchored by White Pyrenees Lamb from the foothills of Victoria’s Pyrenees Ranges, described by many as the ‘wagyu of lamb’. This lamb is raised without antibiotics and hormone growth promotants, and is showcased in the restaurant’s own double-doored dry-ageing lamb cabinet next to the sunken dining area.
“We’ve used different brands of lamb before, but we thought White Pyrenees worked best here because of the way they handled the lamb and the fat content,” says Michael. “Because we’re using a woodfire oven (not just any oven – a 1.5-m wide Marana Forni woodfire oven, to be precise), which we set to around 280 degrees, we find it melts that fat down quite nicely.”
Guests are able to savour a half or full rack of 10-day aged lamb ribs, 21-day aged lamb shoulder with intramuscular fat marbling, leaner 21-day aged bone-in lamb leg, or premium 21-day aged lamb tomahawk cutlets. “The lamb tomahawk is like a lamb cutlet and a lamb rib together,” says Michael. “In Greece and Turkey you’ll see this cut a lot, but you don’t really see it too often in Australia.”
With the centrepiece sorted, guests are free to customise the rest of their meal as they see fit, selecting from a range of snacks, village-style sides, small plates and large-format dishes – the majority of which are kissed by woodfire. Stand-out snack options include Dark Shepherd’s signature pillow bread (a puffy hybrid of Turkish, Greek and Italian flatbreads) served with dips, crumbed pastitsio bites (filled with wagyu lamb, pasta, bechemel, tomato and Greek cheese), woodfired scallop drenched in tyrokafteri butter, and woodfired prawn souvlaki with skordalia and chilli oil.
Dark Shepherd’s arnaki (Greek sausage made using lamb mince, onion, herbs and sweet potato), saganaki with lemon, almonds, mavrodaphne sauce and cherries, and woodfired quail with onion, red wine and grapes make for a suitable stepping stone between the menu’s small and large plates. Non-lamb mains include woodfired toothfish with creamy lemon and sweet paprika foam, woodfired cabbage with garlic, tahini and pistachio, youvetsi (slow-cooked beef, pasta, soft spices, Greek pastry bread and flamed cognac) and live lobsters from the tank served one of three ways.
The restaurant’s beverage program is substantial. Oenophiles will be pleased to hear that a weighty wine list offers roughly 140 options from Australia and Europe, with medium-bodied reds from Italy found alongside fortified sips from Portugal, French champagnes, light whites from Greece and Spanish reds. Meanwhile, Dark Shepherd’s bar also dispenses classic cocktails and a six-strong selection of signature concoctions. We suggest trying the Achilles, which mixes milk-washed Gospel Solera rye with apricot liqueur, almond and macadamia liqueur, orgeat and apricot puree).
Between Dark Shepherd and Pompette, Tassis Group is finishing 2024 strong. With the festive buzz in full swing and locals flocking to Queen’s Wharf in greater numbers, perhaps now was the perfect time for this double-header debut, after all.
“I’ve never seen a precinct with this much traffic – the vibe has been incredible,” says Michael. “But this is only a start – in the next few years we’ll start seeing it develop even more into a better precinct.”
Dark Shepherd is now open to the public. Menu info, operating hours and booking links can be found in The Directory.