Six hours, two shopping centres and 50 (or so) food vendors in one of the country’s best food destinations. Get ready.
The Sunnybank Food Trail is set to return next month, taking over the south side suburb on Saturday, June 27.
It will mark the 12th year the one-day event, intended as a celebration of Sunnybank’s diverse international cuisines, has taken over sister shopping centres Sunnybank Plaza and Sunny Park, which sit opposite each other on the intersection of Mains Road and McCullough Street.
Organisers are expecting approximately 30,000 visitors during event’s six-hour run time, ordering tasting plates that top out at $5 from around 50 food venues across the two centres.
“I think it’s probably the cheapest food event in south-east Queensland,” says Lisa Smith, senior marketing manager at Retail First Pty Ltd, which operates Sunnybank Plaza and Sunny Park and is responsible for the festival. “A lot of the prices are $2 or $3.
“But what really makes it so special is that ‘choose your own adventure’ notion of the event. You get your map and your menu, and decide what you want to eat with your group. From students to families, everyone can navigate it their own way.”
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The full program of vendors has yet to be finalised, but event goers can expect snacks and small plates from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, among others. There will also be live music, lion dancing and kid zone activities.
Smith says the festival has evolved alongside Brisbane’s wider food scene, and that, day-to-day, there’s a lot more competition now in Sunnybank’s neighbouring suburbs.
But the key to the Sunnybank Food Trail’s ongoing success is its location at the suburb’s iconic northern intersection, which has a shopping centre on three of four corners, and Retail First overseeing two of them.
“It’s a unique position and I don’t think anyone else could do what we’re doing with the trail because we have the scale that we need to manage crowd numbers across both those centres,” she says. “And having those 50 or so restaurants involved gives people a lot of options.
“I love to watch how people interact with each other on the trail because you end up in queues waiting for your food with strangers. But they’re all talking to each other because they’re comparing what they got at the last stop and what they’re going to go to next.
“I love that element of it … it’s really about the people and the opportunity for that community connection, which we don’t get a lot of these days.”
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.From our partners
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
