Melbourne steakhouse pioneer unleashes its parrilla grill in Brisbane

“Don’t mention the doors.” Mikey Dalton is joking, but only just.

He and restaurant manager and business partner Ben Robinson have spent three years carefully shifting into place the opening of San Telmo Brisbane. They’ve worked in various restaurants, studied local dining habits, investigated different tenancies in different parts of the city.

The chef and restaurant manager respectively then spent 16 weeks building their venue on Edward Street in CBD. They convinced the landlord to extend the tenancy and enlisted local designer Kate Archibald and had a parrilla custom-built and put together a floor team and ran a series of soft services.

And then the front doors didn’t arrive. Bummer.

If you know San Telmo in Melbourne – and after 15 years, many visitors to the Victorian capital know San Telmo – then you probably remember the heavy timber door that serves as its entry. It’s imported from Argentina.

So are Brisbane’s – there are two of them, or there will be once they arrive.

“The doors are homeless, somewhere in Argentina,” Robinsons says, laughing.

“We eventually found someone to make them for us in Argentina but then they ghosted us, so we had to start again. Losing all that time meant it was delayed and we had to make the call [about opening].

“We’re opening the doors [this week] – but unfortunately not with those doors. It will be a party in itself when they arrive.”

You understand the frustration, given Dalton and Robinson’s methodical preparation of everything else. But it’s that same preparation that means diners likely won’t notice.

Such is the disarming but unmistakable presence of this Edward Street restaurant, Archibald having given it a comfortable, lived-in feel that neither apes the original too hard nor slips into Disneyland “Argentinian Restaurant” territory. It’s all tanned leather booth seating and tiled walls and marble surfaces, a side bar helping frame the entranceway and a sizeable open kitchen with its lengthy parrilla greeting you as you stroll in.

But the more everyday details count here too: Archibald’s focus on acoustic treatment, and the landlord’s decision to bring the restaurant’s glass frontage out to the sidewalk rather than keep it buried within the ground floor of the RACQ Building that San Telmo calls home.

“My wife and I met Kate through our kids, as you do when you’re our age,” Robinson says. “We took her down to Melbourne and when I showed her the building she was like, ‘I get it. It’s been here for 15 years. You can’t just recreate that patina.’

“But I think she hit a great little hybrid of the same tile details and the same dimensions of certain elements. It feels right.”

The preparation and confidence comes through in the menu also, which is very similar to the Melbourne restaurant, and is mostly differentiated by its choice of local produce.

You could argue it’s too similar, but the payoff is the group has had a lot of time over 15 years to refine what they do and, besides, the Australian audience for Argentinian food has done a lot of the changing in that time – the San Telmo that lands in Brisbane in 2026 is fully formed for diners who understand exactly what it does.

“We’ve been really lucky in that what we did in 2011 – telling diners that they were going to be sharing steaks – was a big thing,” Robinson says. “There was a long period where people wondered why we weren’t asking how they wanted their steak done.

“Everyone’s more educated now, from the butchers … to the diners,” Dalton says. “People’s knowledge just gets better and better. They know what they’re talking about now.”

The menu kicks off with smaller plates such as house-made Argentinian chapa flatbread served with pickled cucumber, spanner crab bomba with lemon aioli and a piquant sauce, empanadas (of course), an O’Conner flank tartare, and a vibrant tuna carpaccio with charred mandarin and a sweet pepper escabeche.

Much of the heavy lifting with the larger plates is performed on the parrilla, built by The Brick Chef in Melbourne. There’s a 500-gram grass-fed ribeye, a 500-gram dry-aged Stockyard striploin, marinated free-range chicken, Margra lamb rump and a Borrowdale pork tomahawk. There will also be rotating dry-aged specials in a cabinet soon to be installed by the front window.

The plates are completed by a bunch of desserts that include a chocolate torte with a Dulce de leche mascarpone filling, and the restaurant’s signature Dulce de leche creme caramel.

For drinks, there’s a deep wine list that goes hard on Argentinian drops – malbec and pinot noir are particularly well presented – and includes a bunch of exclusive imports. There’s also a generous mixed drinks list and a clutch of specially imported vermouths.

It’s all big, heady stuff designed to appeal to the CBD’s financial district that’s on the restaurant’s doorstep, and feels like a legitimate addition to the precinct, which includes Golden Avenue and French Connection over the road and – perhaps more tellingly – fellow steakhouses Walter’s and Moo Moo just down Edward Street.

“Those places are a stone’s throw away, but the steaks they do are different – they have their own place,” Dalton says. “We’re part of this growing area of the CBD and I don’t think anyone thinks of it as competition – if they’re going to be busy, we’ll be busy.”

Open Sun–Thu 11.30am–10pm, Fri–Sat 11.30am–11pm.

60 Edward Street, Brisbane, (07) 3180 1110

santelmo.com.au