6

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 debate

about 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 69

COLLAGE PHOTOGRAPHY RODNEY MACUJA. PHOTOGRAPHY WILL MEPPEM, JESS REFTEL EVANS AND MARTIN REFTEL & ROB SHAW