Is Kepos & Co Sydney’s best Middle Eastern restaurant?

This is true, but it would be more correct to say that we have a love affair with Italian food.

We cook it, we eat it, we go out to eat it. If we ate any more Italian food we’d be Italian.

Our obsession is such that we often eat Italian food at the expense of other great Mediterranean cuisines. Why, you might wonder, does pasta and pizza triumph so emphatically over kibbeh and pide?

Chef Michael Rantissi at Kepos & Co in Waterloo. (Picture: Bob Barker)

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that many Middle Eastern venues retain a “cheap and cheerful” or “ethnic” sensibility. While the foods of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Israel and Morocco are as accessible and mouth-watering as those of countries north of the Mediterranean Sea, the restaurants and eateries in Australia are not always so approachable.

I can’t see my mother, for instance, venturing into an Auburn falafel house as fearlessly as she might a Five Dock pizzeria.

Eggplant and buratta at Kepos & Co in Waterloo. (Picture: Bob Barker)

 

One man who is changing both perceptions of Middle Eastern food in Australia, and the reality of it, is chef Michael Rantissi. Israeli-born Rantissi runs one of Sydney’s loveliest cafes in Waterloo’s Kepos St Kitchen, has a stunning new cookbook — Falafel for Breakfast — and, with his partner Kristy Frawley, has opened Kepos & Co, a sister to the cafe.

Like his British counterpart, the chef-megastar Yotam Ottolenghi, Rantissi brings Middle Eastern cuisine into the mainstream and into the now, delivering delicious food in a personable, approachable package.

Scan through the menu to view contemporary reimaginings of Middle Eastern dishes, starting with, say, eggplant mutabal dip with pomegranate ($15), oysters with lemon and chimichurri ($12) or warm hummus made in a mortar and pestle ($17) — dishes designed to awaken and stimulate the palate.

The interior at Kepos and Co in Waterloo. (Photo: Bob Barker)

Beautiful presentation combined with careful selection of produce result in seemingly simple street dishes coming startlingly to life. A tomato salad with pickled shallot and herbs ($18) is as fresh as mountain air, each jewel-like tomato (some conventional, some heirloom) popping lustily with flavour.

Smoky slabs of roasted eggplant, meanwhile, served with a knobbly twist of burrata and madly chopped almonds ($24) is magazine cover perfection to look at, and silky to eat, the smokywood-fired eggplant seasoned with lemon juice and zest, olive oil and garlic before it cools, to maximise flavour. It’s a perfect blend of texture and taste.

Chicken bastilla ($25) — Morocco’s version of a chook pie — is fragrant with cumin, coriander and fennel seed, the flaky filo pastry top sprinkled with cinnamon and icing sugar. It’s sweetly satisfying.

There’s more — whole snapper with walnuts, chilli and tahini ($35), stuffed quail with dates, pine nuts and sujuk ($34), caramelised octopus with carob and shallots ($26), an savoury-sweet combination that offers a flavour nod to Asia. Each dish is presented gorgeously, often with separate ingredients laid next to one another in modern styling that suits these ancient flavours.

The space is perhaps not as quaint as Kepos St Kitchen but is enlivened by Moroccan tiles and shimmering lights offering an exotic feel. But it’s not so much about the decor as about the food. Who needs pizza, after all?

@lizziemeryment

KEPOS & CO

Score: 7/10

Address: Shop 5, Casba, 18 Danks St, Waterloo

Phone: 9690 0931

Web: keposandco.com.au

Hours: Tuesday-Friday from 11.30am and 6pm; Saturday, 9am-3pm, and from 6pm, Sunday, 9am-3pm

Food: Middle Eastern

Source: Daily Telegraph, Elizabeth Merryment, June 30^th 2015