The tuna chilli sanger (with hash brown) that’s autumn’s best comfort food

The most popular sandwich at Sincerity at Jacorey? Co-owner Corey Park dutifully points at the menu on the counter: the ebi katsu sando, he suggests. Or perhaps the bulgogi sando. Or maybe it’s the chilli karaage sando.

All are a hit with Sincerity’s regular clientele. I’m here to tell you, though, that Sincerity’s regular clientele are wrong – if only a little bit.

These are fine sandwiches that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone. Still, they’re all outshone by a chilli tuna mayo number that’s this autumn’s best comfort food. Here’s why.

Actually, first, a little about Sincerity by Jacorey

Park and partner Jamie Kim opened their first cafe, Jacorey Dessert Cafe, in early 2024 and soon followed it with Sincerity by Jacorey. Park tends to work front of house on the coffee machine, while Kim oversees the kitchen.

The early focus at both cafes was handcrafted desserts such as a range of Basque cheesecakes, alongside cream lattes and iced matcha. It was only later that Kim developed a range of savoury sandwiches. They’ve since become some of the two cafes’ best-selling items.

Sincerity by Jacorey is in Upper Mt Gravatt and is a funny spot to get to. It’s slotted into the ground floor of a pair of apartment buildings perched half a block back from the intersection of Logan and Kessells roads. To get there, you jump off the M3 at Klumpp Road and then wend your way through the backstreets, crossing under the over the freeway a couple of times.

It’s an unusual location but a pleasant one, protected from the traffic that thunders along Logan Road. Outside, there are a few tables gathered around a garden bed; inside is dominated by a communal timber table, with counter seating looking out through floor to ceiling windows.

Sincerity by Jacorey’s chilli tuna mayo sandwich

What initially attracted us to this brilliant sandwich was – counterintuitively, perhaps – its relative practicality when compared to its more Instagrammable stablemates (the ebi katsu, in particular, is a real peacock of a sanger). But that restraint makes sense when Kim tells you how it came about.

“I have this vivid memory of a spicy tuna [toastie] my sister once made,” she says. “Even though I usually can’t handle spicy food, it was that perfect kind of addictive spicy. I’ve been craving it lately so I decided to recreate it using our chewy sando bread.”

This thing is far more than a tuna toastie, though.

Kim mixes skipjack tuna with kewpie mayo and a bunch of spices to create the silky chilli tuna mix at the heart of the sandwich (“[Skipjack] has richer flavour and better texture than albacore,” she says). That’s layered into the sandwich with rocket, honey mustard, tasty cheese and, most importantly, a piping hot Edgell hash brown that Kim chose for its crisp outer shell.

Then there’s the sando bread that the ingredients come slapped between, which Kim chose after testing “countless” other brands. She won’t be drawn on where she gets it from but says its “chewy but soft” texture provides the sandwich’s punctuation mark, especially when lightly toasted as it is here.

The perfect comfort food

Yes, this thing has way more going on than that toastie Kim’s sister made all those years ago, but the DNA is the same. It’s brilliant, soul-warming comfort food. That combination of texture and flavour, and then the interplay of temperature, is so thoughtful and precise it’s like you’re sitting in on Kim’s own nostalgia.

It’s manageable – you can eat it in one hand – but I often find myself eating it with two, elbows on the table, much like I used to when sitting at the kitchen counter as a kid, lost in daydreams.

Where to get it

Sincerity by Jacorey’s chilli tuna mayo sandwich is $23.50. You can get one at 5 Cremin Street, Upper Mount Gravatt.