Nour’s new chef, Ibrahim Kasif (ex-Stanbuli), knows how to have fun with Middle Eastern food.
15.5/20
Middle Eastern$$
For the past five years, Nour has been serving the punchy, fresh flavours of the Middle East – Lebanon, in particular – from the centre of Surry Hills’ main dining strip. Why it took me five years to make a booking, well, that’s mostly down to my own bias. Why head to Crown Street for kofta and kibbeh when everyone knows Sydney’s best Middle Eastern food is in Greenacre, Punchbowl and Merrylands?
Anyway, stupid notion. Nour is terrific. A frazzled stump of batata harra – potato poached in oil, salted, pressed and fried, and wearing a little hat of garlic toum and fish sauce-enhanced fermented chilli – is one of the most delicious ways you can start a meal anywhere ($9.50).
With a toasty exterior giving way to featherlight spud, it’s like the crunchy bottom of a paella cosied up with a hash brown. A potato gem with prime-ministerial ambition. Sure, you can buy a whole bowl of batata harra in Greenacre, Punchbowl and Merrylands for just a few bucks more, but I can’t recall encountering a more satisfying iteration of the dish.
Ibrahim Kasif is the new chef behind the snack, and the reason I finally popped into Nour on a Wednesday night in September. While the restaurant’s former chef, Paul Farag, is still on the books with Esca, Nour’s hospitality group owner, he also has two-hatted Aalia in Martin Place to run, plus a new rooftop mega-venue set to open on George Street.
If you remember Kasif’s cooking at Enmore Road’s Stanbuli, where he sent out vibrant plates of mezze and charcoal-roasted meats honouring his Turkish-Cypriot heritage, you might be as pumped as I was for his return to the kitchen.
Enter Nour’s sizeable dining room and you’re immediately greeted by a maitre’d and a dozen chefs shucking oysters, stoking coals and threading skewers. There’s a lot of pastel and muted yellow and other colours which, no doubt, have Dulux chart names like “Arctic Daisy”. The place is thronging every Saturday lunchtime, when a competitively priced, bottomless drinks package ($119 for a six-dish banquet with free-flowing rosé) pulls in bridal showers like my pantry does moths. But it’s still more than half full when I visit mid-week, with the kind of clientele who make me wonder if I should spend more time on my eyebrows and hair.
“Every Saturday lunchtime, the bottomless drinks banquet pulls in bridal showers like my pantry does moths.”
Despite serious intent on the pass and floor (and sommelier Sarah O’Dwyer’s impressive wine list offering a 2014 Domaine de Bargylus shiraz blend from Syria at $47 a glass), Nour knows how to have fun. Take the pressed lamb neck ($58), for instance, cooked overnight on the bone and lavished with a sharp tomato sauce, yoghurt and burnt butter. Served on soft eggplant and toasted bread, it’s a Surry Hills-ified take on iskender (the original halal snack pack) and what could have toppled over into a fatty mess becomes quietly thrilling, thanks to Kasif’s rendering and sauce skills.
Diced, raw silver trevally ($32) flirts with chaos, too, layered with a confetti of tabouli, pomegranate and smoked salmon roe on a base of horseradish-infused cacik, Turkey’s herbier take on tzatziki. Covered in a big, floppy, green sesame leaf for tearing and scooping, it relies on the right balance of salt, lemon and olive oil to keep the momentum going. Kasif has tweaked everything on the old menu since he took over in August while introducing several dishes of his own. A more liberal use of olive oil and salt is a key change across the board.
Eggplant, the darling vegetable (although technically a fruit) of Lebanese cuisine, becomes the most custard-like version of itself when wood-fired, split open and served with a pepper-thrumming hot sauce and zaatar-doused cracker ($29). Still missing Kylie Kwong’s crisp-skinned duck with sweet-sour citrus sauce from when she was cooking just up the road? Kasif has created his own steamed and roasted “mishwe” rendition, starring juicy, dry-aged half-duck ($69) marinated in baharat spice and sticky with a dark, fruity sauce (a too-sweet quince reduction on my visit, but now blood orange, and then plums once their season begins).
I’m also keen on the wood-fired coconut basbousa pudding ($22), an old Farag dish served golden and bubbling in a cast-iron skillet, but I feel that even better things are coming. Greenacre and Punchbowl are still there for a visit (and by the time you read this, I dearly hope Lebanon is, too), but it’s not often that you experience modern Middle Eastern food like this: food cooked by a chef with a strong command of flavour and his own point of view.
The low-down
Vibe: Poised, smart-casual dining with a singular take on Middle Eastern food
Go-to dish: Batata harra ($9.50 each)
Drinks: Wine list with a broad scope of prices and styles from Australia and the Old World, including a few Lebanese drops; tidy selection of cocktails and spirits
Cost: About $200 for two, excluding drinks
This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine
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Callan Boys is editor of SMH Good Food Guide, restaurant critic for Good Weekend and Good Food writer.
