Thai boat noodles is the specialty, but there’s a stack of soups, noodles and toppings to choose from.
Wiyada Korte can’t cook. Her mum can, though.
“I’m not a very good cook at all,” she says, laughing. “But I go into the kitchen and taste the chef’s food. ‘No, this is not right. You have to do it again.’ I know this food. I know how it should taste, because of my mum’s cooking.”
Korte’s abiding food memories are from Thailand, where she was born. She talks about waking as a child at 6am to the smells of the kitchen.
These days she arrives to work to the smell of a kitchen. First it was at Ari on Adelaide Street in the CBD, which has been slinging Thai street food to hungry office workers since late 2024. Now, it’s SayHi Thai Noodle Bar, which Korte unveiled in a laneway and car park just off Charlotte Street in April.
Ari was always envisioned as a curry and rice spot, but not long after it opened, Korte noticed the response when she started putting noodle dishes on the menu.
Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox.
“I’m an education consultant by trade … I have an office upstairs.
“A student came to me and said, ‘Thank you so much for this. This makes me feel like I’m eating at home.’ So I knew a noodle shop needed to be my next venue.”
SayHi is well hidden down a brick-framed laneway deep in the CBD. Look for the Genki Mart sign, head towards the car park out back, ducking the paper lanterns as you go, and you’ll find the kitchen in colourfully decorated semi-permanent container-like premises. It’s surrounded by trestle tables, and red and blue plastic furniture.
“I saw this location and thought, ‘This is just like a Thai backyard,’” Korte says.
It’s constant movement out here, diners filing in, quickly deleting generously portioned bowls of noodles before filing out again.
The menu leaves you in the driver’s seat. Start by picking your protein – chicken, pork, beef, tofu, vegetables or squid – and then match it to soup or style, such as tom yum, spicy and sour, or tum sen lek. Finally, there’s the usual array of noodle options – vermicelli, rice, flat, egg and instant, plus zucchini for those wanting to keep it light.
The signature? A fragrant, dark and delicious Thai boat noodles. This, really, is what Korte is reminiscing about all those years ago in Thailand.
“Ayutthaya is like Brisbane with its river,” she says. “[In the morning] they’d come any boat and sell you a bowl from a big pot they have with a dark broth with plenty of herbs. When you eat it you feel alive and warm.”
There’s no liquor licence just yet so beverages are limited to dirty soda, Thai milk tea and a fridge full of soft drinks.
Looking ahead, Korte says to expect the restaurant to continue to grow into its outside space. At the end of May she strung up festoon lights, lending a touch of South East Asian food market at night, and she plans on capitalising on the vibe by adding an outside kitchen.
Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
