Review of Tawlet – Beirut

I’m sick of it. There’s a sort of monotony in Lebanon’s restaurants: the same old mezze, charcoal barbequed meats and some seafood if you’re on the seaside. I came hoping to see some flair and innovation, but the whole thing might be a fleeting dream. When every restaurant is a déjà vu, inspiration for writing is a bit hard to come by.

Tawlet is not a déjà vu, unless you’ve been reading the NY Times, Vogue, Masterchef magazine or if you’re a Bourdain fan and remember the Beirut episode (the one were he didn’t get stuck in a war). This widely acclaimed and highly publicised restaurant is a spin off from Souk El Tayeb, Lebanon’s first farmers’ market. In a most unlikely neighbourhood below a residential building in the grittiness of Beirut’s Mar Mikhael, Tawlet is a funky, little spot showing off its modern, clever design and stylish finishings and is home to a crowd so hip and cool that they’ve forgotten how to speak Lebanese. I joke, but deep down, I feel a bit upset about the lack of real Lebanese people at Tawlet. That is perhaps the result of Tawlet’s international reputation being much stronger than its local one, which means a more international clientele is attracted, in addition to those Lebanese wankers who can only speak French.

Forget the stupid crowd. You probably won’t notice it, and in any case, we’re here for the food, so let me tell you a bit more about it. Tawlet has been better described as a producer’s kitchen – the same people who grow the food for the farmers’ market Souk El Tayeb cook the food for Tawlet. Like the menu, the chef changes daily. Today, it could be a farmer’s wife, and tomorrow it could be a local cook, but they all use high quality, seasonal produce and dish out some seriously tasty stuff. The food is not cheffy but it’s not boring either. It’s home cooking, all honest and all good, and done really well. The food is served in a buffet and is for a set price : 40,000LL + VAT for open buffet or a reasonable 15,000LL + VAT for a “Business Lunch”. Tawlet likes to celebrate regional cuisine, but from what I’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t rush to label the food as regional. My general feeling is that true regionality in Lebanon is quite minimal due to the country’s small area – most Lebanese people cook from the same repertoire, with minor variances on recipes, with few exceptions of course. Forgo regionality for seasonality: depending on the time of year and the chef, you could get anything from wonderful makloubeh (eggplant, chicken and rice pilaf with nuts) to mildly spicy sujuk (Armenian sausage) cooked in pomegranate molasses, great salads, soft white beans with coriander and garlic, and eggs with awarma (confitec lamb), all made from prime Lebanese produce. Desserts haven’t failed us yet. If available, try halawet el jibn, a cheese pastry filled with clotted cream and doused with sugar syrup – it’s bloody wonderful – or anything else since it’s all good. There’s a fantastic list of Lebanese wines to boot, and good arak, so if you’re in Beirut, go to Tawlet, and if you’re Lebanese, stick to your mother tongue.

P.S. My deepest apologies for the hipstomatic photos… I couldn’t help it.

A Trip to Jarmaq

El Nabattiyeh is one of those out of the way cities, somehow overly populated while being in the middle of nowhere. The streets choke with dense, irregular traffic and those carelessly wandering on foot fill even the tiniest spaces between the cars. Have you heard of swarm behavior? A single bee or ant isn’t smart but their colonies are – I’m not sure how anyone survives on that road, but they seem to come out of the madness unscathed. Right in the city center is a butcher with half and quarter carcasses hanging out in the shop window. There’s beef and local lamb with large hunks of liyyeh, the beloved tail fat that is eaten raw or used for cooking and perserving. Over charcoal, very little food beats a properly handled skewer of pure tail fat: the surface turns golden and crisp and the inside melts in one’s mouth, savoury and even sweet. Luckily, like many butchers in the area, this shop also doubles up as a charcoal barbeque restaurant, so we enter hungry and eager. Here, eggplants for babaganouj are pounded with a mortar and pestle until smooth and get a touch of tahini, only enough to feel its presence. The kafta, minced lamb and parsley kebabs, are served with chili-flavoured bread – they’re super fresh and bloody awesome.

After a brief wait for the 12-year-old boy who works at the green grocer’s to remove his cart from behind our car, we resume our journey. We enter Jarmaq (ref here), a stunningly rugged bit of landscape both green and barren, and pass by its wheat fields. A farmer is busy with the harvest, aided by two young daughters. It takes some effort, but after he is convinced that I’m not a spy, he lets me take their photo.

The Food Blog in Good Living

Today’s Good Living has an article on the chickpea degustation I hosted with Somer Sivrioglu from Efendy. This is a screen shot from the Good Living iPad app, since I don’t have access to the newspaper itself. As you’ll find out by reading this article, Somer and I are preparing for an eggplant themed dinner in October – I’ll give you more details when I have them. I’m pretty happy with this article and I think the photo of my chickpea and walnut trifle looks great. It’s a wonderful dessert, if I may say so myself, so go and try it at Efendy – Somer’s added it to his menu.

The Journey to Lebanon

On Friday, I leave for Lebanon. I will be there for three months visiting family and researching Lebanese food (if you know a book publisher, now’s the time to send them my way ). I’ve had a huge week preparing for this journey – let us not forget the chickpea degustation that took place on Thursday at Efendy. There will be more on that night coming later, but let me say that it was by far the most brilliant event I’ve organised (followed closely by my first event, the secret dinner at Element Bistro). The night was a huge success and I’m still buzzing. The extra adrenalin has allowed me to undertake a frenzied, mindless attempt at packing my luggage for the big trip – still not sure what I have put in that bag. One thing is for sure – I’m taking the following books which I feel I can no longer part with – ones I think would be great for a relaxed afternoon cooking session:

• Mouneh by Barbara Abdeni Masaad
• MoVida Rustica by Frank Camorra and Richard Cornish
• Saha by Greg and Lucy Malouf
• Bourke Street Bakery by Paul Allam and David McGuinness
• The Real Food Companion by Matthew Evans

My first meal in Lebanon? Most probably a cheese knefe, or perhaps a man’ousheh b’ zaatar (see picture).

Chickpea Degustation at Efendy Balmain

Hello dear reader. Here are the details for the chickpea degustation at Efendy. Booking starts now, so book asap. If you are coming, please leave a comment and let me know. I’d love to know who of you will be there.

Raw Milk and the Making of Real Butter

I get these strange thoughts sometimes. I worry about getting stuck in a time warp, ending up in the days of King Richard the Lion Heart, being faced with the need for penicillin, and then kicking myself for never taking the time to learn how to make my own. There he is, the noble king, lying injured, susceptible to infection. His life is in my hands, but though I am aware of the biotechnology that could save his weakening body, I lack the manufacturing knowhow. Cruel fate, damn you!

Do you get stupid thoughts like these? Probably not, and why should you, but it’s certainly why I’ve always felt like I needed to learn how to make things from scratch. Sufficiency. That’s a state I’d love to achieve. Today, in my quest for this sufficiency, I taught myself how to make my own butter. Feeling pretty good about myself!

It’s been almost a year to the day since we moved to Flemington, and this week we moved out. In preparation for our upcoming trip to Lebanon, we decided to bid Flemington adieu and spend a month with Elaine’s parents in Picton. I love Picton. The green country side, more sunshine than you could ever wish for, acres of space, a star-studded night’s sky and real, raw milk.

The milk comes from cows that belong to a family friend. My mother in law, Pam, brought me 2 liters of super fresh, non-homogenised milk and that got me super excited, as you could imagine. Raw milk is a rare treat in Australia. You can’t get it at the supermarket. I once saw it in a health food shop and it was advertised as a product to be used for a “beauty bath”. That’s because raw milk does not get sold for food in Australia. This one is absolutely beautiful. Look closely and you can see the cream line in the bottle. The milk is super fatty, almost one third cream. I love that! The more fat the better (I’m a low carber these days, so fat is my friend). I used some cream in my morning coffee, to make an omelette, and to make butter. Really great butter.

Making butter turns out to be easy. Put your cream in a jar. Shake the heck out of it. Ten minutes or so, the butter will separate from the butter milk. Strain it, squeeze the excess liquid out, salt the butter and eat it! It doesn’t last long I hear, but it shouldn’t have to last long, right?

The Urban Olive

Consider an olive tree, full of large juicy fruit with hues of green, red and black. It’s there, and it’s free, waiting to be picked and turned into food. If this tree was in the middle of nowhere, which incidentally is the worst part of nowhere, I’d understand if the fruit went undiscovered and met its maker as it dropped off the branch – death by natural causes. But if this tree is in the middle of a thriving suburb, with thousands passing by it daily, isn’t it a crime for the fruit to go to waste?

I found this little olive tree in Newtown! Yes, Newtown – the urban center of alternative bohemia, the old and the new, the deeply carnivorous and the savagely vegetarian, the eco-conscious and the overconsumer, the good, the bad and the ugly. Newtown has it all. Sure it does. For some reason though, it still isn’t the kind of place people would consider foraging to be an acceptable hobby. I passed by this tree on my way back from my birthday lunch. Lainy and Sara were there and so was my brother Maroun and the omnipresent Ludwig. I got 2 paper bags from a local cafe, Ludwig climbed and picked the high branches, Maroun and I took care of the lower ones, while Lainy held Sara who was wonderfully amused by the whole scene. Fifteen minutes later, or should I say 2 kilos of beautiful olives later, we were all buzzing with joy from our little treasure. What can I say? The best birthday present ever!

So olives are now at the end of the season. Pick them this week or wait a whole year. I bet there are some in your neighbourhood going to waste. I know there’s a huge tree near Central station that would feed 20 people for a year. Seek it! I would have done it, but I am no where near the city these days. So here’s your chance. Get out there and pick some olives!

Here’s what I imagine you’d ask:

Q: I don’t know how an olive tree looks like
A: It’s the one with olives on it

Q: I don’t know if they’re ripe
A: They are. Now’s the time to pick them

Q: What if they’re poisonous olives
A: They’re not

Q: What if they belong to someone
A: Any self-respecting olive grower has harvested by now, so should you

Q: I tasted the olive from the tree and it was still bitter
A: It will certainly be bitter, regardless of how ripe. You need to cure it

Q: Cure it? Is it sick?
A: No! Curing means adding salt/brine or using a method to extract the bitterness and preserve the olive

Q: How do I cure it?
A: Use Google to find out. All you need is rock salt and a bit of patience – usually 3 weeks or so of waiting. Recipes vary. Mom uses around 200 grams of salt per  kilo (at the most). Others use a kilo. Search for Greek salt cured olives recipe

Good luck!

A Chickpea Degustation at Efendy, Balmain

I don’t know why I do these sorts of things. I can’t just write about food I tell you! For some reason, every 6 months or so, the need to be in a commercial kitchen cooking for a large group of people takes over me. It started with my secret dinners at Element Bistro (to which I stupidly invited SMH Good Food Guide editor Joanna Savill – luckily she loved it!). That was followed by 2 secret dinners at Fix St James, and then a dinner at Bistrode CBD last year with the Merrivale Group, a week or so after my baby girl was born. This year, it’s no different and though I already have a million things to do before I leave for Lebanon, I’m getting really excited about this year’s event: a degustation dinner with Sydney’s finest Turkish chef, Somer Siviroglu of the wonderful Efendy in Balmain.

The great thing about this dinner is the central ingredient we’ve chosen for it: chickpeas! On my last trip to Lebanon I was inspired by an experience I had at a little water-side restaurant in the ancient city of Sidon. The restaurant’s menu was completely based on chickpeas, the humblest of ingredients. At first, I found that strange and didn’t know what to think, but when the food started coming out, oh boy! It was beyond excellent. The dishes included stunning renditions of balila, fatteh bi laban, fatteh bi tahini, hummus bi lahme, all Lebanese classics, and several other chickpea based specialties whose name I can’t recall but which were extremely delicious nevertheless. I was also blown away with how different each dish was, and it struck me how versatile chickpeas really are. That experience has been brewing in the back of my mind and I’ve been contemplating organising this event for over 2 years now. Luckily, chef Siviroglu didn’t knock the idea back, snickering at my petty chickpea dreams, but seemed even more excited about it than I was!

This dinner will to give Sydney siders a taste of Lebanon and Turkey that they wouldn’t usually experience unless they travel to that part of the world. Somer and I will stick to tradition and won’t attempt anything too “chefy”. It’s about being authentic and giving you guys something honest, real and cultural, a little taste of back home. Desserts might get a bit creative, though, but I promise, no sweet hummus!

I won’t leave you hanging for long and will give you the full details very soon, so you could get in and book early. The photo above is a sneak preview of one of the dishes which I plan to include on the night. It’s one of my favourite chickpea dishes, fatteh bi lahme (meat fatteh). Instead of the traditional mince, I slow cook brisket for around 4 or 5 hours. The result is too good for words.

What do you think about this event? Leave a comment and let me know (that it’s not a stupid idea).