Diners travel from as far as the Gold Coast and Ipswich to go large on its smoky chook and generous halal snack packs.
At 19, Kezra Sefian used to drive a shisha delivery van.
“I advertised and was dropping them off for the night,” Sefian says. “I was happy. I’d go to parties, meet people. That’s how I saved my money for this.”
This is Sizzling Birds in Mount Gravatt East, and Sefian is now 25. Over the past five years, this pokey little shop that could in the Civic Fair shopping complex has become a southside go-to for charcoal chicken.
But its story is as much Sefian’s parents’ as it is his own.
“They had a takeaway shop when I was younger down in Sydney,” he says. “It did fine, but it was easy back then. They said, ‘You just opened up and people came’.”
When the Sefians moved Kezra and his brothers up the highway to Brisbane in 2016, they decided to repeat the project. But things had changed.
“They realised it’s different to a couple of decades ago,” he says. “I bought it off them after 16 months. I was looking at opening something else and had the money saved, so I said, ‘Look, why don’t I buy it off you guys?’ I gave them everything they put in.”
Since taking over the shop, Sefian reckons he has at least quadrupled the store’s sales, much of which he puts down to his investment in digital marketing (if you’re someone who follows Brisbane’s food scene, you’ve maybe seen Sizzling Birds pop up on your Instagram feed).
But he’s still using one of his father’s recipes, and his mother’s business, Get Stuffed Cookie Pies, sells pistachio, Biscoff and Nutella sweets on the front counter.
“My dad was born in Sydney but both his parents were from Lebanon … When we were growing up in Sydney, if Dad was cooking, it was warek enab, kibbeh nayah – all that really good stuff,” Sefian says. “He was usually cooking the [savoury] dishes.
“In the year and four months they had the shop, he had about five different recipes [for the chicken],” Sefian says. “When he came up with this one, I was, like, ‘Dad, this is the best.’ And then a couple of months later, he wanted to change it again. When I bought the shop off them, I said, ‘We’re keeping this, it’s the best.’”
Sefian’s right. This chicken is, if not the best we’ve had in town, then very close.
Sefian won’t be drawn on the specifics of the recipe, other than to reveal that he uses halal chicken from ABD Food Services that he seasons with Middle Eastern herbs, sea salt and plenty of fresh lemon. He then cooks the birds over mangrove charcoal that “gives you this nice smoky flavour and burns perfectly.”
His father used to brine the chickens, but Sefian has cut this step due to the number of birds he’s now shifting.
“It adds maybe a bit of extra flavour and makes it a bit juicier, but there wasn’t that much difference,” he says.
The chook is then served whole, by the half or by the quarter with chicken-salted fries.
Other items on the menu include wraps, a popular grilled chicken burger that can come double-stacked, a buffalo burger, and fried chicken wings served in either a buffalo or barbecue sauce.
There’s also a very, very good halal snack pack that comes topped with toum and sliced pickles bought off the shelf at Lebanese grocer Watany Manoushi just down the road.
Step into Sizzling Birds on any given night and there will be a real mix of punters, from longtime locals to migrant families who have driven to Mount Gravatt East for dinner. It underlines how popular the shop has become in its relatively short existence.
“You’ve got white Aussies, and a few Arab families here and there,” Sefian says. “But we also get a lot of Greek families. There’s a lot of Greeks in this area, and they seem to love what we do.
“We’re gaining more customers, getting more traction, we’re starting to do OK – I can finally pay myself a bit of money.”
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
