People assume Eat Street Northshore was designed. It was, eventually. But it began the way most good things around here begin: with a large empty space by the river, a stack of shipping containers, and a suspicion that the two might get along.

A wharf, and not much else

The site was working land long before it was eating land. Wide, flat, wind coming off the water, the sort of place that is either a car park or an opportunity depending entirely on who is standing on it. What it had going for it was the river, the room, and the fact that nobody in Brisbane had tried anything quite like this yet.

The first containers arrived on trucks and left them by crane, which is a spectacle we have never fully got over. Each one gets cut, lined, wired, plumbed and then handed to an operator who makes it entirely theirs, which is why no two of them look alike. One is painted like a corner shop in Osaka. One is wrapped in neon. One has a roller door that lifts to reveal a bar.

Six zones, then the lanterns

The layout came later, and it came from watching people walk. Where they slowed down became a zone. Where they bunched up became a laneway. Six zones took shape that way, each with its own personality and its own reason to double back, and then the whole thing was strung with lanterns. A container yard in the dark is a container yard. A container yard under a thousand warm lights is somewhere you want to spend a Saturday.

Seventy odd kitchens later, the building never really stops. Containers still get craned in. Menus still change. Lanterns still get replaced one at a time by somebody up a ladder while everyone eats underneath them. That part rarely makes it into the photos, and it is our favourite part.