I
t’s Sunday morning, and I’m hurrying down rain-slicked
streets in Melbourne to meet one of the most important
people in Middle Eastern food in Australia, if not the
world: chef Greg Malouf, whose great-grandparents came
out from Lebanon in 1895. His brother Geoff, owner of beloved
Melbourne restaurant Zum Zum, joins us at a café. As Greg
and Geoff take sips of their coffee they complete each other’s
recollections of their family history. “Our ancestors were in
haberdashery,” Greg starts, “probably fleeing the upheavals
caused earlier by the wars between the Druze and the Christians.”
“They came from the very fertile Bekaa Valley,” Geoff
continues, before explaining the influence the growing region
has on Lebanese cuisine. “The spices used in Lebanese cooking
are more subtle than in many other Middle Eastern cuisines,
to accentuate the quality of the produce,” he says.
For the Maloufs, though, as for Lebanese all over Australia,
it would be at least another half century before they had access
to the ingredients enjoyed in Lebanon, and even longer before
they were able to offer their dishes outside of their homes.
The first wave of Lebanese migrants arrived at the dawn of
the White Australia policy, which prompted a national debateabout how to racially classify them. They were referred to as
Syrians, because Lebanon was yet to achieve independence; The
Bulletin in 1906 called them one of three “non-fusible Asiatic
races” and argued they should be denied citizenship rights in
Australia; The Department of External Affairs was more
confused: “They are of swarthy appearance with dark hair... but
approximate far more closely to the European types than those
of India or parts of Asia further East.” For the next two decades,
Lebanese migrants pointed to their Christianity and their paler
complexion to argue for their status as white people. It wasn’t
until the 1920s that they were, in historian Anne Monsour’s
words, “granted status as honorary Southern Europeans”.
But as Monsour reminds us, it came at a price – they had to be
culturally invisible. Arabic foods like kibbeh and tahini were
now incriminating. The walls of the domestic fortress went up.A
few blocks from my house in Redfern is a small
Lebanese restaurant on Pitt Street called Wilson’s.
Old Lebanese men with creased, pouchy faces sit
outside on milk crates, gossiping beneath a fluorescent
1970s sign that has been cracked and hastily repaired. Humble
as it may appear, this restaurant, which opened in 1967, is one of
the oldest Lebanese restaurants in Australia. Sourcing ingredients
back then was an obvious problem for Wilson’s, so they relied
on travellers. Quarantine restrictions were lax, and one chirpy
newspaper article from The Sun in October 1950 gives us some
idea of how food was smuggled in: “Hanna Lahoud and Chafic
Younan reached Sydney today,” the article reported, bringing with
them “two big, closely guarded cardboard boxes filled with oils,
frying fat, almonds, pomegranates and vegetable matter.” There
were also “cloth bags of peculiar smelling items, which Lahoud
and Younan intimated were pretty good to eat.” They brought
their own olive oil, which “leaked through one of the boxes in a
steady stream at the Customs desk”.
The year 1967 was significant for Middle Eastern cuisine in
Australia for another reason: Australia signed an Assisted Passage
agreement with Turkey – the first time it did this with a country
beyond Western Europe – and with this migration scheme came
all the spices of the Ottoman Empire. The vast majority of
Turkish and Lebanese migrants arrived in Australia between the
1970s and 1990s; the Turks were promised abundant employment
opportunities and the Lebanese were fleeing the Lebanese civil
war and the Israel-Lebanon war. Many ended up staying because
of family connections, and it was family that influenced the
kind of Middle Eastern cuisine that Australia came to know.
“The earliest restaurants offered home cooking,” says
Abboud. “They weren’t professional chefs trained in Lebanon;
they were people who were offering up the food of the
household.” Kasif says much the same of Turkish cuisine, and
that as much as he pushes the boundaries of Turkish cooking,
he still tries to “replicate the smells of my grandmother’s cooking
growing up.” Greg Malouf has memories of his brother and
himself hopping like seagulls in the kitchen doorway until his
mother dropped a tasty morsel into his mouth. Melbourne chef
Abla Amad, being a girl, was permitted a view from inside the
kitchen. Amad learned the joys of mint and rosewater from
watching her mother, uncle and “aunties” prepare dishes for ➤Clockwise, from far left: Wilson’s in
Sydney’s Redfern; Abla Amad at
Abla’s, her restaurant in Carlton,
Melbourne; chef Greg Malouf;
stufed mussels at Ibrahim Kasif’s
Stanbuli; an 1892 article from The
Illustrated Sydney News reports on
“Syrians” living in Redfern.GOURMET TRAVELLER 69COLLAGE PHOTOGRAPHY RODNEY MACUJA. PHOTOGRAPHY WILL MEPPEM, JESS REFTEL EVANS AND MARTIN REFTEL & ROB SHAW