A POPULAR Brisbane city cafe has been forced to ban bacon from its menu after a neighbouring tenant complained about the smell.

Gramercy Coffee received a formal letter from Wintergarden centre management after Winnie Bridal allegedly raised concerns that the smell of sizzling bacon wafting through airconditioning vents was permeating their store.

The bridal store, owned by Michael Yeung, sells couture dresses valued between $3000 and $10,000, and has been in Brisbane since 1988.

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Gramercy owner Mitchell Suchowacki said his cafe had been serving bacon in breakfast bagels and on toast for nearly two years to happy customers and that the complaint he received last month was “incredibly frustrating”.

“The biggest thing was the shock of not knowing anything about it and then having this massive drama arise overnight,” Mr Suchowacki said.

He said Mr Yeung had been in touch with centre management previously but had never raised the issue with him personally, despite working in proximity to the cafe.

media_camera Winnie bridal store sits above Grammercy in the Wintergarden. The smell of frying bacon permeates its gowns, say management. Picture: Jono Searle.

“We have no relationship with the tenant upstairs and if we had just talked about it face-to-face we could have come to an arrangement to keep both parties happy,” he said. “It’s a shame because it places us in a bad light and we never knew anything about it.”

Instead, Mr Suchowacki spent weeks experimenting with cooking styles to avoid further heat from his neighbour.

“It all got too much so we just cut bacon out completely and now we serve jamon, which people are happy to have,” he said.

When approached, Mr Yeung declined to comment, but a Wintergarden spokesperson confirmed the issue was raised and under Gramercy’s lease agreement cooking bacon “is not and has never been permissible”.

media_camera Hmmm, bacon

“The cooking of bacon impacted the quiet enjoyment of another tenant in the centre and therefore Gramercy were reminded of the items they were able to cook within their Edward St tenancy without an extraction fan,” the spokesperson said.

Mr Suchowacki said the situation has left him unable to provide a popular breakfast ingredient.

“There was never any need for this to go to formal letters and for them to talk to the parties above and make it a bigger deal than it needed to be,” he said.