Paradise Park

Well gee Oliver, I guess if you’re going to review this little well kept secret I may as well do it too :) Don’t hate us locals! We’re just trying to share the love!
I bback everything Oliver says and more, the vibe of this park is truly lovely, it’s like a gentle little patch of a more innocent, peaceful time just waiting to soothe your cares away.
I’ve never tried cooking my own pizza’s there, but I’m damn tempted to now — although heating requirement is duly noted.

Paradise Park is (until now, maybe ;) one of Brisbane’s best kept secrets. It has a lot to offer: a basketball half court, a community herb garden, barbecue facilities, a children’s playground and the piece de resistance — a clay cob oven which you can cook pizza in!
Last year I made some pizza bases and sauce from scratch and took them, some toppings and some friends down to our little slice of Paradise for some, well, slices of wood-​fired paradise. It was a bit of a learning experience. Turns out that to get the best cooking effect you probably want to get there a few hours early so you can get some coals going. Also, a word to the wise, don’t use baking paper on your cooking tray or it will stick to the pizza bases during cooking. It can also be hard to get the cooked pizza from the tray, so ideally you want a good metal sliding implement to extract your bounty. A pizza cooking stone would probably hep too.
In the end though we enjoyed our pizzas (and easier to extract calzones) immensely and had a really fun time. There was a weird moment about halfway through our little party that we realised that there was a lone figure sitting in the children’s playground, nearly motionless (we’d thought it was a trick of the light earlier). Weird.
Good pizza though!