The free add-ons at this new Galeries lunch spot help offset food-court stress

The air hangs thick in the Byron hinterland. We’ve tracked about 15 minutes out of town, over hills and through bushland, and parked outside Palisa Anderson’s homestead on Boon Luck Farm.

Anderson pulls on gumboots and we crunch through grass, feed the ducks, collect eggs. Over the next hour we’ll taste starfruit ripe from the tree, fill arms and baskets with red-fleshed cara-cara oranges, admire rows upon rows of coriander, betel leaves, holy basil.

Anderson didn’t plan to be a farmer, but when this daughter of Chat Thai founder Amy Chanta first broke ground at Boon Luck Farm (BLF) outside Byron Bay in 2015, it changed the course of her life. Not only did she build a reputation as an organic, regenerative wholesaler to fine diners such as Quay, Yellow and Pipit, she did something arguably more impressive: create a supply line for the clutch of Chat Thai restaurants she operates, which across dine-in, takeaway and delivery serves roughly 10,000 people a week.

The water spinach in your padt paak boohng? The tempura pumpkin in the som dtum? In season, they’re direct from Boon Luck. The same goes for plenty of other ingredients at another of Anderson’s locations: the food court in the Sydney CBD basement of The Galeries, where Chat Thai has run a hot bar since Chanta opened it in 1999. But we’re not here to line up for boat noodles or yen ta for, we’re here to eat rice.

Since May, RiceFace has been ticking over in a space carved out of the stall’s eat-in section. Six variations of protein and rice anchor the menu, but Boon Luck Farm is all over it. Go the turmeric-and-coconut-marinated grilled chicken thigh, which is plated with sweet BLF pickled cabbage. Pick the barbecue pork shoulder in pickled plum and lemongrass gravy and it comes with gently steamed BLF greens. Choose your rice base – soft, fragrant, triple-A Thai jasmine in every case: the butterfly-pea flowers that dye it shock-blue and the turmeric that tints it orange and gives it dusky, aromatic depth are both grown there.

A cup of golden chicken broth – currently a free add-on – is a peppery, life-giving elixir.

Rice Face’s menu is small, but the news isn’t. Anderson hasn’t launched a new venue since she and her family opened Boon Cafe in Thai Town in 2016. The division of her mother’s estate means Boon is now operated by her brother. Under Anderson, it drew international acclaim for its produce section and cooking that represented the childhood of a third-culture kid growing up in Australia.

RiceFace doesn’t reach those heights, but this is a counter tooled for the lunch rush as much as the pressures facing restaurants. It’s about paring things back, minimising overheads, maximising scalability, without losing sight of what got you there. Look at A.P Bakery’s remarkable rise, or how Freo – run by Federico Zanellato of Lode and LuMi– is taking on Yochi.

Currently, RiceFace’s closest Galeries competitors seem to be Dopa or Fish Bowl. Judging by the lines at lunchtime, it’s losing. But RiceFace has the farm factor, and the staples – protein plus rice – have only gotten better.

Order the poached chicken, sliced and slicked with a soy-garlic reduction; the skin is sweet and jellied over flesh that retains its bite.

Order the beef and hard-working brisket, slackened in a sticky, five-spice braise, is plated with BLF-sourced daikon. It’ll put you down, but count on crushed BLF chilli in vinegar to perk you back up.

These are the staples, but it’s the extras that bring the magic. The standard upgrade is to rice infused with chicken fat and golden chicken broth, lightly scented with confit garlic, ginger and pandan. A cup of said broth – currently a free add-on – is a peppery, life-giving elixir.

The soft herb salad, just $10, is built around Anderson’s herbs, plus red onion, tomatoes, peanuts and shallots, and balances sweet and sour, hot and fragrant so expertly it’d be at home in any of her restaurants. There’s savoury punch in the dark-soy and yellow-bean sauce. There’s fish-sauce funk and tamarind sharpness in the nahm jim jeaw. Both are yours for a couple of bucks.

They’re the kinds of additions that make the persistent noise and the jostle for tables recede. Same with the drinks, a changing selection made with whatever’s abundant in Byron, from Boon Luck honey and pandan to organic mandarins or longans.

Those same longans make it onto dessert, alongside black sticky rice and BLF black corn as a topping for coconut soft-serve. The cream, pressed out of coconuts daily, is fresh and wholesome in a way canned just isn’t.

There’s no doubting the mission here, and Anderson is passionate about servicing a market that relies on rice to fill a spot in their stomachs and souls that only rice can fill, but the question remains whether it’ll be a runaway hit when even the queue at Chat Thai dwarfs the one at RiceFace. But then, like Boon Luck itself, maybe it just needs time to grow.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.