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For years the hungry and hungover have queued in Newstead for Yianni Passaris’ decadent breakfast in a bun. Now it’s the city’s turn.
What do we eat when no one’s looking? Yolk has a very specific answer to that.
“What makes a good bacon and egg roll starts with a soft, soft bun,” Yianni Passaris says. “You’re cooking that bun in the fat of the streaky bacon, you’re absorbing those flavours.
“You want that fat cutting through the cheese, the sauce, everything. Then you’ve got a good-quality egg, and you can’t go wrong with American cheese.”
There’s one more thing, Passaris reckons.
“What elevates the bacon and egg roll – it’s a must – is adding a hash brown. That takes it from middling to top-tier.
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“It adds temperature, it adds crunch. It gives it extra umami. It just works.”
Yolk is Passaris’ temple to the humble bacon and egg roll. And by temple we mean a slickly designed counter he opened inside Gasworks Plaza in 2019, with a few tables out front. It made manifest what was once a secret item on the menu at the Passaris family’s Morning After cafe in West End.
Every weekend they queue – the hungry and the hungover – for Passaris’ cure to their ills. No one cares who’s looking.
Passaris reckons he makes the best bacon and egg roll in Brisbane, and Yolk has been so monumentally successful, it’s hard to believe it’s taken this long for a second shop to appear. Finally, though, Passaris opened Yolk in the CBD on Tuesday.
“It’s been frustrating because we wanted to roll out more,” he says. “We’d get approaches, but previous buildings in the city that I looked at, we couldn’t make work because of the gas, or maybe the building hasn’t sufficient power to support all the equipment. If it’s not power or gas, it’s canopy related.”
Passaris finally settled on a spot on the ground floor of the 307 Queen Street building. It’s little more than a roll-out counter and a yellow-tiled back wall. A small indoor dining section is due to be finished next week.
Out back, though, there’s a relatively expansive kitchen that’s “much larger than Newstead”, enabling this poky little shop to punch out the same menu of bacon and egg rolls, steak and egg rolls, chicken burgers, cheeseburgers and bowls of chicken rice.
“Where can I go, besides McDonald’s, to get a nice bacon and egg roll in the city?” Passaris says. “If I can make it work in the city, Yolk will work anywhere.”
All the essentials are the same. There’s still the generous range of sauces, including hollandaise, cayenne pepper hollandaise, chimichurri, and truffle mayo. Then there’s the Kiev mayo for the buttermilk chicken strips – a nostalgic nod to when Passaris was home alone as a kid (his parents owned iconic Italian restaurant Cafe Dell’ugo) heating plates of chicken Kiev in the oven.
For drinks, it’s still Five Senses coffee, but an extensive espresso and filter operation lined across the counter that uses $68,000 worth of equipment. Otherwise, there’s freshly squeezed orange juice and a selection of sodas.
“People say to me, ‘Yianni, why don’t you do those fancy drinks like Mont Blancs’, but I don’t want to be stressing out my staff for a drink that’s going to be trending for three months.
“People are always going to resort back to a flat white or long black, just like people are always gonna resort back to a bacon and egg roll because it’s an Australian staple.”
Open Mon-Fri 7am-3pm
307 Queen Street, Brisbane
