Eating Out: The FAT Carrot, Botanical Lab (GOMA, Entwined edition)

Hi friends. This is the first part of a two-part post I will be doing based on a nice time I had. It was the day after my wallet being stolen, so it was nice to have some fun! Last Friday I had a big afternoon and evening planned after I finished work at 1pm. I was meeting my friend Amy in the evening at the museum so we could go to our Lego After Dark night that had been postponed due to lockdown a few weeks earlier. I decided rather than drive all the way home and then back and few hours later, I would just go get some food and also see a few other exhibits. Make the most of an afternoon in the area.

First things first, some lunch! I drove into West End and decided to try out a vegan banh mi at The FAT Carrot. I'd walked past this place a lot, but never actually eaten there. From the outside, it looks like a juice and smoothie bar. And it is, but it also has a great Vietnamese menu with a lot of vegan options. I got the vegan crispy chicken banh mi, which was wonderful.



Afterwards, I stopped in at Botanical Lab to try out some of their flavours of vegan soft serve. This is not a completely vegan place, but it has a lot of vegan options including bubble tea, soft serve sundaes, and some other treats. Just ask if you are not sure. I have been there once before. I wanted to try their two vegan soft serve flavours, which at the moment are taro and cherry blossom. I got them in a sundae with strawberry jelly and brown sugar syrup. This was HUGE! And so ice cold! I was running a bit later than I thought to get to the art gallery, so I was trying to eat this quickly, which wasn't very easy. The cherry blossom soft serve was a lovely flavour, but I think it overpowered the taro. Next time I am goign to get taro alone in a cone so I can really experience it.



I headed over to GOMA to see their European Masterpieces from the Met exhibit. Apparently the Met in NY is doing renovations, so they sent a bunch of their paintings to Brisbane. As you do. This was a pleasant exhibit, though to be honest most of it was not the style of painting that I am super into. But I could appreciate the artistry. But a couple caught my eye, including this portrait of the Comtesse de la Chatre, which was painted by Elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun, one of the few female painters of the time.



And this, The Young Bather, by Gustave Courbet.



I also really liked the way the exhibit was set up. They had some very fancy arch and mirror tricks so that part of it seemed like you were in a very ornate hallway. And in the middle they had a place set up like an open French courtyard that included some still life displays you could sketch, and also they would occasionally have live models for drawing classes. They also had some of the paintings rendered into a 3-D technology so that vision impaired people could experience them, which was cool and something I have not seen before.

Of course I was also drawn to a few other pieces, that ended up being the most obvious ones. I guess I am basic. But I still enjoyed seeing Dancers in Pink and Green (by Edgar Degas), The Flowering Orchard (by Vincent van Gogh), and Water Lilies (by Claude Monet).







After this I popped into the State Library of Queensland to have a look at their Entwined: Plants and People exhibit, a lovely collecting looking at the relationship between plants and people through art, photography, and cultural pieces. It was an incredibly serene place to be. Here are just a few of my favourites.









Thanks for hanging on to the end of this post! Check back next time for part two, which will involve Lego and burgers!

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Given that I was about to meet up with Amy for the evening, I had to share a photo of one of her cats. This is Neil, the most handsomest black boy!