In Beaconsfield, two minutes from South Beach and surrounded by the residential streets of Hamilton Hill, Hilton and White Gum Valley, Ripple Brewing has lovingly built a genuine neighbourhood pub. Founder Joel Nash spent twenty years living around the area before deciding it needed what he’d found in the pubs of England and Europe, a local that doubles as an extension of the living room. The beer is brewed metres from the tap. The food, made by Shauna Shapiro under the banner Shapiro’s Shop, arrives by way of a rotisserie chicken truck parked permanently on site.
Neither concept is chasing scale. Nash has watched craft beer’s more mature markets move away from national ambition and toward genuine relevance within a single neighbourhood, and built Ripple around that same idea. Shapiro, who has cooked through Madalena’s, Nieuw Ruin and Anchovy, has found in the truck a low risk way to work out what her own food wants to be before committing to bricks and mortar.
Here, Nash and Shapiro’s answers sit side by side, tracing what it takes to make a suburb feel like somewhere worth staying.
The idea
“Bring great beer back to the suburbs” is the line Nash keeps returning to, though he’s careful about what it implies. “I’m not sure it’s something the suburbs here necessarily lost, maybe it’s something we’ve never really had enough of.” The idea came from time spent in Melbourne, England and Europe, where a neighbourhood pub is simply part of the street it sits on. “You don’t make plans to go out there. You just drop in, you know the people, you bump into neighbours, and you might stay for one beer or the whole afternoon.” Perth has plenty of pubs, he says, but most are places you travel to rather than places that belong to a suburb. Ripple was built to be the second kind, somewhere to walk to, bring the kids, sit in the garden and feel at home.
Shapiro traces her own throughline back further, through kitchens in Sydney and Perth, a bagel pop up, and now a chicken truck at a brewery. “I’ve always wanted to make food that people are genuinely excited to eat. I’ve never been particularly interested in doing something just because it’s what you’re supposed to do as a chef. I like food that feels generous, a bit nostalgic and, ultimately, makes people happy.” Her bagel project Polly’s was the first time she built a small community around food herself, and Shapiro’s is its evolution. “It’s still very much me, just with a lot more chicken.”
Proximity and freedom
For Nash, brewing, winemaking and spirits all happen within metres of the taps, which changes more than freshness. “We’re not brewing primarily for a wholesale market or thinking about what might generate hype or sell nationally. We’re brewing for the people sitting in front of us.” Nash and head brewer Matt are often the ones pouring the beer they made that week, which means the tap list can shift with the seasons and with what people actually order again. “Straight From the Source” isn’t just a tagline, he says. “We’ve tried to build the whole brewery around it: make things here, serve them here, and remove as much as possible between the producer and the person enjoying them.”
That same proximity is what drew Shapiro to Ripple rather than opening her own room straight away. “It gives me the freedom to concentrate on the food and actually enjoy building the business. Running a restaurant is obviously a huge commitment, and I’m not sure I want to take all of that on just yet.” Ripple came with an existing community and a relaxed setting built in. “People can come for a beer, get some chicken, bring their dog, hang out, it doesn’t feel too serious.” More than that, it gave her room to work out what Shapiro’s wants to be before she commits to a permanent space. “I feel incredibly grateful to Joel, Leon and everyone at Ripple for giving me an opportunity like this without the massive financial undertaking that comes with doing it independently.”
Relevance over scale
Nash was never tempted to chase a national footprint. He’d watched more mature craft beer markets, particularly in the United States, move past the idea that every new brewery could become a household name with national shelf space. What replaced it was more interesting to him: breweries that became genuinely important to one neighbourhood or region, which he sees as beer returning to what it originally was, made locally and consumed locally by a brewery that belongs to its community. He points to bread and coffee in Perth going the same way, small independent operators replacing the national names people used to default to. There’s a practical side too. Wholesale beer at real scale needs enormous volume, tanks, packaging, warehousing, sales reps and marketing, with no guarantee of the market share to justify it. “We’d much rather put that energy into making Ripple a place that people in this part of Perth genuinely love and use. We don’t need everyone in Australia to drink Ripple. We’d rather be really important to the people who live around us.”
Shapiro found something similarly counterintuitive in rotisserie chicken, a category that looks crowded until you actually try to do it well. “Chicken is so familiar and relatively simple that there’s nowhere to hide. If the chicken isn’t juicy, the skin isn’t good or the seasoning isn’t right, people notice.” The idea came to her lying in bed, thinking about how Coles had made a chicken so loved it earned its own slang. She wanted Shapiro’s to nail the same familiar thing without making it precious, good chicken, good sauces, good sides, in a roll if you want it.
Why Beaconsfield, why the truck
Nash chose the suburb because it’s the one he knows, more than twenty years living around Hamilton Hill, White Gum Valley and Beaconsfield. It sits two minutes from South Beach and South Fremantle but is genuinely surrounded by residential streets, Hilton, South Fremantle and Coogee among them. “We weren’t looking for a traditional hospitality strip or somewhere people would necessarily travel across Perth to visit. We wanted Ripple to become a local for the people living around it.”
Shapiro is a few months into strong weekly trade and in no rush to leave the truck behind. “I definitely have ambitions for Shapiro’s beyond the truck, and I’d love to have a permanent shop one day. But I’m not in a huge rush to get there. I want to build something with longevity rather than grow too quickly and lose what makes it good.” She can already see where that might land, a bagel shop of her own in and around Fremantle, a second life for Polly’s.
What earns a spot on site
Nash built the food side of Ripple deliberately, as an opening for chefs with something of their own to share rather than a kitchen he directs. “Rather than us employing a chef and telling them what the Ripple menu should be, an independent operator can build something of their own here.” The bar for who gets that opportunity is simple: it has to be something Nash and the team would genuinely seek out themselves. “Shapiro’s has been a really good example of that. The food is uncomplicated but really well done, generous, familiar and delicious, and it naturally works with beer. But importantly, it still feels completely like Shapiro’s.”
What Shapiro carried into that spot came largely from two kitchens. Anchovy taught her about depth and layering, sauces built within sauces, everything made from scratch. Madalena’s taught her seafood, breaking down and butchering whole fish under real pressure, and something less expected, the pride that comes from staff meals. “Experiencing people being genuinely happy or excited by something I’d created for a staff meal taught me a lot about what food can convey. You can communicate love and care through food, and there’s a real sense of pride that comes from seeing people enjoy something you’ve made.”
No ceremony required
Nash has never been drawn to formal beer and food pairing, lager sitting naturally with food without needing a system built around it. “Beer, to me, isn’t wine. It’s not about analysis or matching notes, it’s about moments.” That same instinct is why Shapiro’s found an audience so fast, he says. “People have really responded to this place being uncomplicated and a little bit different, without taking itself too seriously.” The food doesn’t need explaining, and neither does the beer.
Thursday burger night is where Shapiro lets that looseness show. The core menu stays put, but Thursday gives the team room to play. “If someone has an idea for something they’d love to do, we’ll order in the ingredients and run with it. I don’t want to put something on just because it sounds interesting, though. It has to be delicious, a little bit fun and something I’d happily order myself.”
Where it goes from here
For Nash, the food and beer relationship at Ripple is still being worked out, and that’s the point. What Shapiro’s has shown him is how much food can add when it’s given its own identity rather than sitting alongside the beer as an afterthought. “We want it to feel much more natural than that. Good, uncomplicated food that makes sense alongside a beer, that people want to share and that keeps them around a bit longer.” The one condition he keeps coming back to is ownership, whoever leads the food needs the freedom to do their own thing.
Shapiro’s answer is simpler. “Honestly, just keep making it better. We’ve grown pretty quickly, and there’s still so much I’m learning about the business and what people want from us.” For now, the community around the truck is enough. “We’ve got a great little community around us, the food is selling, people seem to be having a good time, and I’m excited to see where we can take it.”