What's the best compliment you could pay a chef?
Sure, you could try praise or awards – but showing impatience, resorting to thievery and enacting sabotage? That's the ultimate tribute. That's how you show proper respect for a dish.
Long before became a professional chef, he enjoyed his dad's cooking; there was a spiced Egyptian eggplant number his father regularly made that was a big after-school hit.
From grade one onwards, Farag remembers coming home and seeing his father either frying eggplant on the stove or leaving the crisp-edged, golden pieces out to cool as he prepared the tomato sauce.
"I'd try to sneak in a bit of eggplant and wrap it in a bit of Leb bread or some sort of flatbread and eat it," says Farag. "He'd be like, 'hey, get out of it, leave it!'"
It didn't matter that the dish wasn't ready, or not yet slathered with rich tomato sauce. It was too good to wait. Carrying off these eggplant heists was a sign that Farag was a big-time fan of the dish – which was on the table practically every week. "This was something that was always around," he says. "I've eaten it thousands of times."
The chef serves a version of it at his newest restaurant, in Sydney's CBD, where it's listed as eggplant mes 'a' aha with preserved tomato (the spiced Egyptian dish is also known as eggplant mesa'a'ah, mesa'ah or mesa'a'ah).
Farag's take is a slicker interpretation of the dish he grew up with, which "had great recyclable properties for a family dinner". Sometimes, at home, it'd be layered with béchamel and transformed into a Greek moussaka – a nod to his mother's heritage. Her family, who have Greek and Syrian roots, ended up in Egypt as political refugees. Although she was born there, no one in her family had rights in her birthplace. "She was stateless," he says.
Farag's father is , and followers of this religion have endured persecution in Egypt. "My parents wanted to live in a secular country," the chef says. So they migrated to Australia in the 1980s, nearly a decade before Farag was born.
While Aalia is a showcase of lesser-known Middle Eastern dishes and celebrates flavours from the region, Farag wasn't always professionally interested in pursuing this style of cuisine.
"My first comment was: 'well, I've never done Middle Eastern food'".
When he did food tech classes in high school, he preferred playing around with Asian flavours.
"My parents noticed," he says. "And then the classics disappeared a bit." His father would make Egyptian staples for himself, thinking his children didn't care anymore.
Then Farag ended up skipping family meals altogether. At age 15, he left school to become a chef and would arrive at home at midnight, pizza in tow, from the Italian restaurant where he worked.
It wasn't until he was 19, living out of home for the first time – with fellow chef Andrew Bowden (aka ) – that he started appreciating Middle Eastern cuisine again. Near their Redfern place was a joint that sold koftas, wraps and other dishes that transported Farag down memory lane. This area has had a longstanding connection to Middle Eastern culture – in fact, it used to be known as , because of the heritage of the migrants who'd settled there many decades ago.
For most of Farag's career though – from the kitchens of The Summit, The Four In Hand, Monopole and Fish Butchery – his cooking didn't deeply veer into Middle Eastern territory. So he was surprised when restaurateur approached him to become executive chef of , a Surry Hills restaurant inspired by Lebanese cuisine.
"My first comment was: 'well, I've never done Middle Eastern food'."
But it turned out Farag sort of had, without realising – and Moubadder had noticed. The albacore tuna he produced for Fish Butchery, for instance, was one such example of this. And sure, he'd never put koshari on the menu, but he made for staff meal at Fish Butchery, and also had done occasional guest spots, where he had drawn on flavours of the Levant.
In 2020, he took over Nour, "a beast of a venue". Creating a menu for an ultra-busy venue that serves 1,500 diners or so a week meant relying on some "relatively safe" flavours. So when Moubadder approached him to be executive chef at his next Middle Eastern restaurant, Aalia, Farag didn't want to repeat the Nour formula. "It had to stand on its own, be unique and showcase something different," the chef says.
"Middle Eastern food gets blended into one category and I don't want that to happen. Why can't it be more?"
Aalia's opening was originally slated for 2021, but ended up happening this March. For its menu, Farag wanted to beam the spotlight on less-familiar Middle Eastern dishes.
"I have a couple of words I know from my childhood [for] these dishes, so I started Googling these dishes, to not much avail – not much information is out there," he says.
So he started hunting through old vintage bookstores and found a – modern-day Iraq. After he bought it, he was recommended other ancient books from the region, which is how he ended up with Ottoman and Egyptian books that are around 600 years old.
They're not like the typical cookbooks we’d recognise today. "There's a whole chapter on digestives and soaps," he says, referring to one of them.
Some of these ancient texts are "an absolute nightmare to read", he says, just because they're so different to modern books. There aren't exact measurements for ingredients, either. "It's more like: 'a pinch, a punch, throw in this much, say a prayer and hope for the best'."
He adds that every recipe has 'Inshallah' at the end, because Islamic rule had begun. This translates as 'God willing' – or more specifically, 'God willing the recipe works out'.
So instead of following specific instructions from these books, he's using them more for inspiration. His discovery that caramel has Arabic origins and dates to – where it was known as (sweet ball of salt) – led to an early dessert experiment at Aalia.
The books also made him realise certain ingredients are more Middle Eastern than you'd think – like taro.
"Everyone always thinks it's a Pacific Islander tuber or Asian vegetable, but Middle Easterns and North Africans have been using it for centuries," he says. Marjoram, oregano and sage – they're staples of the region, too, even though people usually think Middle Eastern herbs are limited to just parsley and za'atar.
Tamarind – something he's loved since using it at a Thai restaurant as a teenager – is also a Levantine go-to (in fact, it's been called the "").
Egyptians are notorious for double-carbing!
Guava and mango have been served in the region for a long time, too. "Even fresh dates, which isn't something you've seen in Australia," he says. "They're almost like a crunchy apple when you eat them."
"My favourite one to talk about [ingredient-wise], is how, pre-10th century, pig was a common thing eaten in the Middle East," he says. The discovery of in the area seems to back this up.
At Aalia, he's highlighting these under-the-radar details, ingredients and dishes that aren't so regularly featured at Middle Eastern restaurants in Australia – from Iranian caviar to his take on Egypt's .
Then there's khorasan, an ancient grain named after the it's from. He turns the wheat into a style of pita that goes well with the eggplant mes 'a' aha he serves.
"From a young age, bread has always been my best friend. And the gut can guarantee that," he says and laughs.
His dad's eggplant mes 'a' aha was a good excuse for carb-loading.
"You'd either dip bread into it, or you'd mix it through with rice and then put it through with bread – if you wanted to. Egyptians are notorious for double-carbing! Or you'd just eat it on its own, with a spoon."
At Aalia, he's reconfigured his dad's dish with some chef-like flexes – adding sun-dried tomato for punch, a zippy addition of an XO-like chilli condiment, and a shroud of green herbs on top.
And while no one has eaten it a thousand times (yet!), like he has with his father's version, it's just a preview of the many possibilities he's imagined for Aalia.
"There's so much more out there, and this is just our first menu," he says. "I've probably got another 300 dishes up my sleeve."
Paul Farag's eggplant mes 'a' aha
Serves 1-2
Ingredients
- 1 eggplant, peeled and diced
- Salt, for salting eggplant pieces and seasoning
- 900 ml olive oil
- 150 g tomato purée
- 100 g sundried tomatoes
- 10 g ground allspice
- 5 g black pepper
- Bread, optional
Method
1. Salt the eggplant and leave for approximately 1 hour. Rinse the eggplant and dry it with a towel.
2. In a deep-sized large plan, add 600 mL olive oil over medium-high heat. In batches,
fry the eggplant for 3-5 minutes on each side until golden and set aside.
3. To make the sauce, add the remaining olive oil to a large frypan on low heat. Add the tomato purée and sundried tomatoes and cook for 1 hour.
4. Season the tomato sauce with allspice, black pepper and salt.
5. Marinate the eggplant in the tomato sauce and place in an airtight container. Refrigerate for up to 10 days.
6. Serve the dish cold or at room temperature, depending on your preference. You can enjoy the eggplant with some bread on the side, as a dip or on its own.
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