Toro Bravo

I went to Toro Bravo twice, once as a going away party for one of my coworkers and once again about two weeks later as part of an Instameet. Eat Brisbane has been formed by the wonderful people behind AmeriAus, they get invited to a lot of restaurants for reviews and they decided to make a Brisbane wide group for bloggers and Instagrammers where we converge on a restaurant and spam lots of photos about it. This was the first meeting and it'll come a bit after the going away party of my coworker.

This place!

The entire place is quite poor lit, it fits in with the whole bar deal but it makes it terrible for photos. Its set out quite nicely though with lovely furniture.

I quite liked that picture for some reason

Both times I went here, we sat near to the kitchen but there wasn't much light even with that being said. It was quite distressing for me. A lot of my photos turned out looking like absolute shit.

The Kitchen!

We got massive jugs of sangria to share between use, I think we had about four or five jugs by the time I left. I had a small sip of the white and red sangria as I don't drink much. The white sangria is quite sweet and quite nicely flavoured, that's coming from a non drinker like me so it must be ridiculously sweet by most people's standards. There are passion fruit pulp, strawberries and blueberries floating around, the blueberries are absolutely wonderful and I really liked scooping them out into my cup to eat them.

Quite sweet and the blueberries are amazing

The red sangria had a strong red wine flavour and I didn't enjoy as much, plus it didn't have as much fruit. It just had a few orange pieces and that was it, I was quite sad.

Glorious red

We couldn't decide what to have for dinner, so since we were a large group of fifteen people we just decided to get two of each tapas and one of each of the raciones. Here is their menu by the way. We got about four serves of these chicken and green chilli spring rolls with a sour orange dressing. They were served fresh from the fryer, super golden brown and crunchy with a lovely, mildly spicy, chicken mince filling.

These were damn good

We got two serves of these chargrilled queso lamb and haloumi skewers. These are a wonderful combination of salty haloumi and charry tender lamb, a lot of people at the table really enjoyed this dish and that's why we got some extra serves. The lemon was hard to share between people is the only thing I think.

Also well loved

We got the crusty pan bread with chives, confit garlic and roasted tomato butter dips. The bread was delicious, I do love my bread. They were grilled perfectly, crunchy exterior with soft tender insides, I also love seeing grill marks on toasted bread. The confit garlic was super garlicky and we were smashing through it in record amounts, the roasted tomato butter was lovely as well.

Tasty~

We got crispy fried calamari with aioli sauce on the side. The calamari was super crispy, lightly salted and very tender, with none of that chewiness from being overcooked.

I didn't realise this picture would turn out so blurry

The only thing we disliked was the completely ridiculous tongs that we were given to serve with. The tongs were very inflexible and difficult to bend, they were unable to pick up more than one or two pieces of calamari in one pinch. As you can see, the end of the tongs aren't designed to meet in the middle and pinch, its more of a side pinch because of how the ends flair out. I have the weirdest feeling these tongs were meant for something much bigger than calamari like ice cubes.

TERRIBLE TONGS

For some reason the charred, spiced chicken strips with lemon yoghurt and salted cucumber strips came with completely normal tongs! These were also well recieved, everyone seemed to be grabbing pieces of this chicken, it was well seasoned with the mildly spicy green sauce splattered everywhere, and the chicken itself was well cooked with a nice charry exterior.

Delicious chicken

We got these big beef short ribs with cherry tomato, green papaya, red onion and mint leaves. I didn't really like them and they were quite a large, unmanageable size so they were a bit difficult to share. They were very fatty with not much flavour, very tender though.

Not a fan

We got about five meatballs with chorizo in a romesco sauce. The meatballs were tasty but the sauce was quite odd, too super sweet and sticky. I don't remember much else about it but I remember not being a fan of it in particular.

):

Field mushrooms, rocket, roasted pumpkin, feta and a sweet sherry dressing. I wasn't interested in it but it was eaten very quickly as everyone wanted something to break up the meatiness of the other meaty dishes that we had had.

This blurry thing

The next thing that we received was the spinach and potato tortilla with sofrito sauce. Another thing we weren't 100% sure how to portion between a large amount of people. We attacked it with knives and split it like a cake, everything was well cooked but not many people ate it because we were getting very full and drunk.

It looked lovely though

We got a big serve of potato bravos, crunchy potato coated in tomato sauce and chilli. We were fishing for the smaller pieces which seemed to have a larger crunchy surface to soft fluffy potato centre.

Add caption

We also had a serve of paella which was half gone before I could photograph it. The photos of all the tapas turned out terribly so I just left them out of this. The next few photos are from my the Instameet! The rest of the photos that everyone else took can be found on Instagram under the #eatbrisbane1 tag.

These are the chicken and corn koftas, they came with a harissa and preserved lemon. They a nice golden brown exterior, super juicy and so tender inside. No one really noticed the preserved lemon or harissa flavour in the chicken.

Tasty tasty

We got some more lamb and haloumi skewers! They were highly praised at this event as well.

That lemon is the size of my phone though, seriously

They gave us streaky bacon wrapped dates smeared in honey, they were super sticky and sweet with a gorgeous saltiness and fattiness from the bacon. A lot of people remarked that even though they didn't like dates, bacon made everything better haha.

Jumbo dates

These were manchego and breadcrumb coated, deep fried zucchini batons with aioli. Do not, for the love of god, eat these when they emerge fresh from the kitchen because you will burnt your mouth off. I warned everyone else off them when they first arrived, and lo and behold, rapid AH HOT comments came from around the table as everyone else dug in. The zucchini was delicious though as most things are when deep fried.

Deep fried stuff!

The spiced chicken was declared the best thing that we ate that day.

Ooh~ chicken

Our last dish was a medium rare sirloin steak with char grilled tomato and capsicum. Also something that was difficult to share between us. 

Succulent steak

Toro Bravo:
Atmosphere: 7, its a lovely place, just a touch dark. 
Service: 8, it was wonderful both nights that we went, there were always someone around to take our requests for more water, more drinks or more food. 
Food: 8, really good food and good sized portions for the prices they were. I would come back here again with friends for sure, but never for anything that required photos cause my photos would look like absolute shit.