One of Brisbane's best restaurant groups takes on iconic rural SEQ pub
Eating out Food
The 1905-built venue has been given a sympathetic facelift but now features an elevated menu of pub classics, and its own brewpub and sunny beer garden.
Ghanem Group has bought – wait, what? The Commercial Hotel in Boonah?
The Brisbane-based restaurant group is known for show-stopping restaurants and bars such as Donna Chang, Iris, Blackbird and Byblos, among a bunch of others.
Reopening The Fox Hotel in South Brisbane or even expanding to Melbourne to create a Flinders Lane take on Blackbird – projects that were both announced in March – makes sense for the Ghanems. But a beloved country pub 90 minutes out of the CBD? Surely locals would be up in arms.
Thing is, the Ghanems are locals. In 2021 they purchased a farm wedged up against the ranges in Tarome, to the west of Boonah.
'During COVID, we wanted an escape from the city,' Ghanem Group director Adonis Ghanem says. 'The farm is right up there against the mountains, overlooking Boonah and Kalbar in the Scenic Rim. So it's a really, really beautiful place. It's almost like a family retreat, where we all go and the kids ride around on their bikes on the weekends. We have a bit of cattle there and some beautiful spring water and creeks running through the property.'
And the Commercial Hotel, the 1905-built, heritage listed timber pub that overlooks the intersection of High and Park streets, with its distinctive exposed framing and open second storey verandahs with lace iron ballustrading, was very much a local purchase, made on the back of some old-fashioned gumshoeing.
'I started coming out here almost every weekend,' Ghanem says. 'I'd come into town to the IGA and Mitre 10 and what have you, and I'd always pop into the pub to get some takeaway and have a cold beer.
'Nehme [Ghanem, Adonis's brother and fellow director of the group] and I were interested in having maybe a rural pub, and something close to the farm. And it just came together by chance, almost.
'We actually went door knocking and it took us just over a year of chatting with the previous owners. It was almost like they were interviewing us, making sure we were the right people to sell to.'
The Ghanems kept the purchase on the down low from the food media, but that was easy to do: for the first year, they ran the pub as is, in order to understand how regulars interacted with the venue day-to-day.
Even now, after a sympathetic renovation, with most of the changes under the hood. There's been a gentle facelift of the bistro, new furniture and bathrooms, new lighting and improved accessibility.
There's also an upgraded kitchen serving a reworked menu designed by group exec chef Jake Nicolson that spruces up traditional pub classics. Expect dishes such as house-made fish fingers and chips with a soft herb tartare and crushed peas, slow-cooked lamb shank pot pie with root vegetables and a rosemary and onion gravy, and a tandoori duck curry served with naan bread and basmati rice.
'The biggest challenge was not making the menu too big,' Ghanem says. 'Because there are so many pub classics you could potentially put on there. But Jake is from country Victoria, so he was really at home tapping into the nostalgia of country cooking.'
The Ghanems' game changer for the pub, though, is the addition of a new craft brewery, Boonah Brewing Co, which occupies the old post office section on the Park Street side of the building, and an adjacent beer garden. It's already pouring a mid-strength and an alcoholic ginger beer, with an additional four core brews – including a pilsner, an Australian XPA and an Italian-style lager made with specially grown Italian barley – to come on tap over the next weeks.
'We've always wanted to do a brewery and it was a great opportunity to add to the building,' Ghanem says. 'It wasn't about changing the public bar but adding an extra dimension to the site.
'We're using spring water from the farm in the beer, and then the beer mash, we're taking back to the farm to feed the cattle. So there was a nice opportunity to close the loop there.'
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