The Kookaburra Cafe, a Brisbane institution best known for serving gigantic, floury pizzas and being inexplicably popular with visiting celebrities, has closed its doors.
The iconic two-storey green and yellow Queenslander on Given Terrace in Paddington housed the pizza joint for 35 years, before quietly shutting up shop last night.
Renowned for their party pizzas that measured a metre in diameter (the website insists that they needed extra-wide vans in order to deliver them), Kookaburra Cafe also managed to lure in a whole raft of touring famous people.
Celebrity customers include Taylor Swift, Katharine Hepburn, Nirvana (!), and Beyonce and Jay Z, who never actually visited but considered it necessary to get two Big Pizzas delivered to their Brisbane hotel room.
Pat Vines, who worked at the Cafe since its opening 35 years ago, told ABC Radio that the owner, Steve Hall, “was ready for a change in his life; it was a really tough decision for him.”
But pizza lovers of Paddington need not commence the tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth just yet: while you won’t be able to walk the very same floor as Kurt Cobain once did, you’ll still be able to buy, ingest, and regret eating entirely too much pizza.
Vines has bought the business, and is merging with another shop just down the road on Latrobe Terrace. He’s promising the same menu, the same giant pizzas, and hopefully the same weird kookaburra-in-a-train-drivers-hat logo.
Source: ABC.
Image: Kookaburra Cafe / Facebook.
