What’s the hottest thing in Hobart eating right now?
It’s Crumb Street Kitchen, dishing up a mish mosh of smoky BBQ meats, salads and $1 sodas à la Californian-Mex/Tex-Mex/Zac-Mex.
Vegetarians avert your eyes! This is no a place for you. Crumb Street Kitchen is a celebration of meat. Succulent, slow cooked, meat.
The success of Crumb Street is a relaxed offering. It is good food and it is laid back.
They use pretty good animal: organic Angus beef, sweet Suffolk lamb and happy free-ranging Tassie piggies. You’ll find a range of cuts of meat and a few other options: fish taco one day, beans another, and last week they started making their own bread.
You say potato, I say potato, who doesn’t like potato salad? They do two salads, the aforementioned and their yoghurt and lime coleslaw, which is refreshing, tasty and good for you.
What the Two Girls ate:
Pulled pork taco for $7
Potato salad shared $3.50
Burnt brisket taco for $7 We also ordered a Angus Beef Rib for $11 but only managed about a quarter of that one between us after our tacos. It was big and tasty!
The pulled pork and burnt brisket rested on a bed of slaw in their own tacos. It’s raised the bar for This Girl who needs to heat up her unused tortilla press. She’s eaten tacos in Mexico and the south west of the United States and these guys rate.
The Crumb Street style is backyard chic; although Zac tells us it looks like his boys’ Lego room, the place he takes his mates to play xbox and show off his latest Lego success. You’ll find piles of cookbooks on the counter, AstroTurf and Tip Resource furniture. You might select the street vista from the church pew in the front window to eat your meal. Or you might take your booty with you in the pizza box it’s served in.
The exit of previous owners, Wood Fired Pizzas, meant Zac and Sian had a tower of pizza boxes to make use of.
Oh yeah, Zac is one half of the Crumb Street success story, complemented by business and life partner, Sian.
Zac and Sian share about thirty years in the hospitality industry between them and come with an impressive foodie resume. The litany includes: the Bedarra 5 star private resort; Peppers Resorts; in Hobart: Battery Point Steakhouse; Pigeonhole; and, Lazenby’s; and in Melbourne, Longrain, the Crown Casino and Frankies Empire on Elizabeth Street. They’ve been running their own catering business since June last year, doing desserts for Fern Tree Tavern amongst other things.
Up until last week, these guys have had one meat smoker taking in around 40 kilos of meat each day. This meant two things. The first: a queue outside their digs; a new movement of Hobart foodies, with a hankering for a serving of mixed up-Mex-meat. The second: the closed sign, with the day’s all-out register. A reliable source, the coolest girl to come out of Burnie, tells us the earliest was 12.37 pm. That’s after opening at 12 noon.
This is what the coolest girl to come out of Burnie ate last week:
Crumb Street Kitchen is rocking the house. Hobart folk want something different to eat and they don’t want to pay restaurant prices for good food all the time.
But success is not all beer and skittles. Between them, these guys put in a minimum of 20 hours a day, getting the goods, preparing it and slow smoking meat. They use an off-set smoker and you need to manage the fire and the temperature carefully, which means checking it every 20 minutes and mopping (mere mortals call that basting) every hour. Now that’s commitment. Depending on the meat, this can take 18 hours for brisket or 22 hours for pork for example.
They are distributers for Yoder from the USA. If you like what they do and want to try it at home, go talk Yoder with them.
In the space of the week since the Two Girls visited, they have more capacity to BBQ and another chef which means that it is less likely you’ll have to queue.
We can’t praise what they’re up to enough and Sian and Zac are sweet-as too. If you haven’t already, go check them out at 144 Harrington Street, Hobart and:
