Originating in Palestine, this sweet and salty treat effortlessly solves that eternal end-of-meal dilemma: “cheese or dessert?”
For Omar Saadeh, the taste of knafeh (kay-naff-eh) is the taste of happiness.
Born in the Palestinian city of Nablus – commonly regarded as the birthplace of knafeh and other Palestinian sweets such as halqum and raha – Saadeh remembers the baked dessert of sweetened cheese caked in spun kataifi pastry being served at birthdays, graduations, weddings and any other joyous occasion filled with hilwan: an Arabic word meaning “sweetness”.
“When something good happens in life, you want to share that happiness with the people you know,” says Saadeh.
“Normally, you’d do this by buying and giving knafeh.”
But even if you didn’t grow up with knafeh in your lunchbox, it’s not hard to understand the dish’s appeal. Or at least if you’re talking about the knafeh that Saadeh makes.
Silky and molten on the inside, elegantly crisp on the outside, it’s the perfect one-two of sweet and savoury as well as a worthy headliner of the Knafeh by Omar show. Since 2022, Saadeh and his team – including his Nablus-born wife Mais – have set up at markets and private events around Perth to share this beloved Palestinian dessert with an appreciative public.
Knafeh by Omar, like so many recent food stories, was a COVID baby. Unable to travel to Nablus and taste the knafeh of his youth, Saadeh – a finance worker by day – rang mum and asked her to teach him the ins and outs of making knafeh the Nabulsi way. After months of trial and error, the purchase of specialised cooking equipment from Palestine, finding someone to make a cheese comparable to the salty, semi-hard cow’s milk Nabulsi cheese traditionally used in the dish and baking some 300-odd test trays of knafeh, our man finally felt he had something worth sharing.
As per Palestinian tradition, Saadeh serves his knafeh warm and cuts pieces to order. When I tasted his knafeh December’s Qaswa Qarnival Islamic festival at the Cannington Showgrounds, he insisted that I ate it hot before the cheese started congealing. Sage advice, indeed. Still-warm knafeh tastes approximately one million times better than knafeh that’s been allowed to cool and harden. While it’s easy to get your back up about being told how to eat a certain dish, it seems fair in this instance. After all, Saadeh has gone to some trouble to bringing a small piece of Palestine to Perth. The least we can do is experience it as intended.
Although knafeh’s history goes back to medieval times, it’s a newcomer to WA’s food scene. Like many, I first tried knafeh at North Fremantle’s dearly departed Propeller – in June, the space hosted a winter pop-up called Sidegate – where Kurt Sampson offered it on both the dessert and breakfast menus. (In typically brilliant Sampson fashion, he served his knafeh with a small jug of rosewater syrup that let diners fine-tune sweetness levels.)
Equally influential in shining a spotlight on knafeh was Meast, a food truck run by Sandra Bahbah-Gleeson that served Middle Eastern street food. In addition to organising summertime food festival South Perth Streats, Bahbah-Gleeson is also part of a cooking family that’s been instrumental in bringing real-deal Arabic flavours to WA. (Bahbah-Gleeson’s uncle Elyas, for instance, opened the state’s first charcoal chicken shop in Huntingdale in 2001. Bahbah-Gleeson’s cousin Paul, meanwhile, lends his name and rotisserie expertise to Pauly’s Chicken & Ribs in Noranda.) After debuting knafeh at the 2017 Food Truck Rumble, Meast would offer it as a monthly special that guests could never get enough of.
“We didn’t do it all the time because it was a lot of work, but when we did, it would always sell out,” says Bahbah-Gleeson who recalls a market where one customer bought an entire tray out of the seven that her mother Mai had prepared. (The fact that Meast priced its knafeh at just $5 per piece probably played a part in the dish’s popularity, as did mama Bahbah’s secret weapon: slipping some pistachio into the dough.)
While knafeh is synonymous with Nablus, the dish has spread throughout the Arab world where it has been adapted for local tastes. Some of these regional variants are available in Perth. In Jordan, knafeh is typically made with a sugar syrup flavoured with orange water. (Palestinian knafeh makers, meanwhile, generally add lemon juice to their syrup: a choice that’s as much about preventing crystallisation as it is flavour.)
You’ll find Jordanian-style kunafa – note the subtle variations in spelling too – at Vic Park’s Petra Restaurant where they’re pre-made using house-made cheese and available in three sizes. The regular kunafa, the smallest size, make a formidable dessert-for-one. They’re baked to order before being turned out of their tins and doused with qater (sugar syrup) and finely crushed pistachios.
Also in Vic Park is Youssef Sweets: a magical one-stop-shop for Lebanese sweets. Here, the knafeh is filled with either cheese or the clotted cream known as qashta. (Whichever version you order, there’ll be a dollop of the latter as a finishing touch for your knafeh.) While the shop’s social media may try to convince you that one slice of knafeh is an appropriate portion size for one, it’s not uncommon to find families sharing one piece between, say, three or four.
From both a cultural and nutritional perspective, it feels right to share the sweetness.
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Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
