The Verdict: I went to the Breakfast Creek Hotel last night with high expectations.  It would be fair to say they were not met.  A piece of chicken that covered all of the chips on the plate was the first indicia this was not going to be a good Parma and did not get better from there! 

Parma Pic:

Chicken: The size of this piece chicken was excellent but something went awry in the cooking because it was dry and, in some places, burnt.  I felt, whilst eating it, that this piece of chicken could have been put to better service in the car park as a frisbee.

Tomato Sauce: Yet again in my search for Brisbane’s Best Parma have I found the tomato sauce of a dish, the BCH Parma in this case, to be its jewel.  It was bountiful and tasty.

Ham: Regular readers will know that I like a slice of ham on my Parma.  A slice of ham is what I got last night however it was such a thin slice that any flavour that might have come from it was overpowered by the tomato sauce.

Cheese: The second, and only other, jewel in the crown of this chicken parmigiana was the cheese. It was well melted and was a generous portion covering almost all of the chicken piece.

Side Dishes: If the burnt chicken started the downward spiral for this chicken Parma then the side dishes sealed its fate.  The chips were soggy. They clearly had been resting in a hot bay waiting for plating and then were not helped by being covered in full by the chicken.  I could not finish them as they were so bad as to make me feel ill.  The salad’s only highlight was the mustard vinigerette that  came with it. 

Presentation: This was a larger than most Parma but it came out on the smallest plate I have seen so far in 12 parmas tested.  Bitterly there was no room on the plate to move the chicken off the chips which meant that just about every fork full of chicken was met with chip fragments as well.  Big meals go on big plates: how hard can it be? 

The Venue: The Breakfast Creek Hotel is a Brisbane icon.  The best indicia of that last night was the heaving crowd wedged into just about all of the available space of the venue.  It is expensive ($29 for my Parma) and the wait to both line up to order (15 mins) and to get food (46 mins) is frankly a bit off putting for what really is pub food.  

The Final Word: The chicken parmigiana at the Breakfast Creek Hotel was an expensive, time consuming disappointment.  It would have been a disappointment if it had have been cheap and quick too. The consensus around our table last night was: stick to steaks BCH! 

I will leave you with a comment from the Parma Consigliere which sums up the night: 

A cockroach just crawled over my foot