Category Archives: Sydney – Inner West

Eating adventures in the Inner West Suburbs of Sydney

Bamiyan, Five Dock

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It wasn’t the most stellar start to a night. I had booked us into Bamiyan using an online service for 8pm knowing that we had a busy day of errands and lots of traffic to contend with from a nearby music festival. They then telephones and we were told that they were quite booked and would we mind coming in at 6:30pm instead. It wasn’t ideal but after a flurry of emails and phone calls, our time was readjusted. However the music festival would impede us at every turn with barricades and police stopping us from getting to our home to dump our thawing groceries. I looked at the clock anxiously, technically we were still on time but Sydney’s traffic is unpredictable and it ended up taking us twice as long to reach Five Dock as it should have.

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During the drive, I rang the restaurant letting them know that we’d be about 15 minutes late. They told us that we had to vacate the table at 8pm which was a new rule that wasn’t conveyed to us over the phone so we raced in, found Queen Viv sitting at the table quite happily and ordered as fast as we could. The interior of Bamiyan is really quite lovely indeed. It’s warm and welcoming with all sorts of artefacts, rugs and maps on the wall as well as framed photographs of Afghani life. Our waiter is also very friendly and in the interests of speed, we order the second banquet meal at $38 a head not including dessert.

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Cherry Lassi $4.50 and Pamigrant drink $4

The kitchen is fast-our drinks arrive minutes before our food. The drinks must rate a mention. There’s cherry lassi, a divine concoction made thick with yogurt and the sweetness of cherries. There’s also pomegranate juice, bottled from overseas but it could be a cousin of cranberry juice with a slightly tart sweetness.

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Seekh Kabab 

The first two items hit the table and we’re excited because the aromas are mouth watering. The charcoal grilled seekh kabab are made up of lamb mince shaped as footballs. They’re perfectly spiced and soft to the bite and are everyone’s favourite. It’s served with a coriander and mint chutney and salad.

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Chicken Tikka Kabab

The marinated chicken pieces are also grilled on charcoal and are moist and juicy with the aromatic char from the grill.

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Mantu beef dumplings 

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Hartsyard, Newtown

hartsyard newtown

I have a list. It’s frequently updated and broken up into five sections: City, East, North, South and West. It’s my “to eat” list and I consult it on a regular basis when friends ask me where we are going to eat. Hartsyard has sat on that list ever since it opened.

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Hartsyard sits on Enmore Road, slightly away from the madness of King Street but that seems to matter not one jot as it has been buzzing since it opened. There is a front bar area and the restaurant itself has painted pipes, topographical maps of the Mid West of America graduating from most densely crowded to least. It’s masculine enough but not overtly so. The service is knowledgeable and warm and they bring us our drinks menu. Craft beer enthusiast Mystery Guy goes for the honey beer while I go for the Pisco Punch because I love Pisco. American born chef Gregory Llewellyn and his Australian wife Naomi Hart are the duo behind Hartsyard.

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The menu shows that there is a sense of fun too with items like roulette peppers where one pepper out of the ten is hot. Our friendly waiter (called “Sparky Sparrow” on the bill) tells us that the menu is broken up into seed (the lighter meals) and feed (the heavier) and surprisingly, suggests starting with two seeds and one feed. A surprise as it sounds restrained and usually one is encouraged to order a lot. However after discussion and because we were unable to decide, we opted for two seeds and two feeds. Prices are reasonable with no main over $31. A nice touch is the price of $4 per person for unlimited Hartsyard sparkling or still water.

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Pickles

A plate of pickles comes out first and they’ve got a nice burst of salty pickling flavour to them and the celery is a favourite amongst the carrot, onion and paper thin slices radish.

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Pisco Punch $17.50

The Pisco Punch is a refreshing mix of Pisco, smoked pineapple, lemon juice and tiki bitters and I cocktails like this because they’re refreshing without being overly sweet, much like a fresh squeeze lemonade would be.

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Oyster Po’ Boy English muffin, Old Bay mayo, coleslaw $17

Mystery Guy is a travel writer and one that was besotted with New Orleans so I asked for his opinion of the oyster po’ boy and he gave it a big thumbs up. The deep fried crumbed Tasmanian oysters were served in soft cornmeal dusted house made English muffins. Underneath the oysters is a creamy Old Bay coleslaw (and this gives me ideas with the Old Bay seasoning that I bought on my recent trip to the U.S., an ingredient often used in crab cakes among other foods). Oh and a plate of these are not safe around me. It comes with their hot sauce and I enjoyed the po’ boys both with and without it.

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Roulette Peppers Romesco, fetta, lemon jam $16

We survey the roulette peppers, some burnished darker in a two layered pile along with Bulgarian fetta, some terrifically good romesco sauce and holy-heck-what-is-this-lemon-jam-because-I-need-to-make-some? It’s a new item to the menu and there are several kinds of peppers including Shisito, Rocoto, Stavros and d’Anglets. I pick up one and bite into it. “Umm is your pepper really hot?” I ask Mystery Guy because after my first bite, I am huffing quite a bit. “Nope” he answers forking bites of mild peppers into his mouth. It turns out that my first pepper was indeed the hot one. The rest are fine, they’re good especially when paired with the garlicky Romesco and sweet lemon jam. “What are the chances that your first pepper would be the hot one?” Mystery Guy muses aloud.

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Poutine: Hand cut beef chilli, cheddar, ranch, hot pepper vinegar $20

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La Lupita, Canterbury

la lupita canterbury

Dear Reader, do you find that sometimes, things don’t quite work out the way that you want them to but perhaps may lead to benefits or ideas later on? You may not know it at the time, and your fists might ball, teeth grit and eyes move heavenward searching for an answer but, eventually, you start to see the silver lining. And apparently that’s along the lines to what happened for Al Carbon Food Truck owner Attila Yilmaz .

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One of the ten food trucks that was set to launch in Sydney during 2012, his truck took longer than expected to be completed. In the meantime, with a catering business set up in Canterbury, he was serving up samples of his tacos. After that, frustrated at the delays taken to finish the trucks, he decided to open up his warehouse space to diners on certain days and the reviews came thick and fast. With reputedly some of if not the best soft tacos in Sydney combined with it’s slightly out of the city location and the fact that diners never quite knew when it would be open helped to ensured its success.

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A former police training officer, Attila swapped his life in uniform to a life following in the footsteps of his Turkish father who owned kebab vans in Canberra. Attila was injured several times in the line of duty but it wasn’t the physical scars but the psychological ones that put an end to his career as a Senior Leading Constable. The case was a particularly brutal 2008 murder involving family members. He recalls the day with sober sadness and as the first responding officer on the scene, had to check the victim for a pulse. As a family man, he couldn’t reconcile the brutality of the murder of a family member and was honourably discharged from the police force and put into motion, a plan that he had been thinking about for years.

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The idea first came to him during undercover work in a park that was notorious for muggings and assaults at night. He thought that by activating the space using parking food trucks with their ensuing crowds would make the area safer for people to walk through. To research Mexican cuisine he travelled through Los Angeles and Mexico and “was downing thirty tacos a day” he says. He travelled with Bill Esparza from the blog StreetGourmetLA and met up with Tijuana based photojournalist and blogger Jason Thomas Fritz Of TijuanaLandia whose atmospheric black and white photograph of the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe festival sits pride of place beaming down on diners. A version of Guadalupe is Guadalupita and La Lupita is a shortening of the name.

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Named Al Carbon which means “cooked on charcoal”, the food truck pops up every few days at a location. However, currently because they need a truck to tow them, they are at the mercy of the truck driver’s schedule.  The current legislation limits food trucks to stints of three hours including set up which Attila tells us is too short a time period as his self designed truck takes about thirty minutes to set up. This time and place limiting legislation is set to change shortly. To supplement the food truck, he opens up this location about twice a week and also caters for festivals and events.  Some customers come from as far away as the Central Coast, Manly and Liverpool while some follow him from lunch to dinner locations eating twice in a day.

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Social Media has helped in numerous ways – one day he tweeted that he would offer a designer a lifetime supply of tacos in exchange for help with branding. He didn’t expect that the head of Interbrand brand management would respond and after an initial meeting, Interbrand were offering their services free of charge and “then we had twenty two staff turn up!”

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Attila Yilmaz in front of his food truck

Every day there are about twenty phone calls asking if they are open. I had called up a few weeks ago to see when they would be open and Attila had answered the phone and a date was set and one warm Sydney evening, Girl Next Door and I were on our way to Canterbury. Even though it’s a main road, there isn’t much open on the street except for one telltale sign and when we walk in, the atmosphere is welcoming and the crowds are excited.

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The black and white image glows on the right and exposed light bulbs hang. There’s a mix of people from families, younger groups and couples. The action is in the  grill, where meats sizzle away on the charcoal getting that crispy char to their edges. A tortilla machine dispenses freshly made flour tortillas and Attila and his young, friendly staff are busy serving, slicing and talking to customers.

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Ordering is like a yum cha menu where a two sided slip of paper gets marked every time you order something and you pay using the slip at the end. We take a seat towards the back where the food truck is parked. There are large share tables and smaller tables and you can also stand up and eat in the food truck itself.

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We start with a range of the food-it’s hard to decide so we try a bit of everything. The menu changes regularly and there’s a mix of nibblies, salad, wings and tacos. Drinks include a Mexican Coca Cola (according to Girl Next Door, it’s stronger in syrup and similar in flavour to postmix Coke) and Agua Frescas which are cold, fresh fruit waters. Today’s flavour is raspberry and lime which is generous with real raspberry with the piquancy of lime.

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Al Pastor Pork y roast pineapple $6 each

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Great Aunty 3, Enmore

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From the age of zero to about seven or eight, I had no concept of first cousins once removed, second cousins, great aunts or uncles. To me, everyone that was part of my family no matter how far was my “cousin” and the elder females “auntie” and elder males “uncle.” When I finally clued onto the fact that there were all sorts of levels of aunts, uncles and cousins, I felt silly. Of course there were. But in Asian culture, every older female friend of your mum and dad’s is your aunty.

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Great Aunty 3 on Enmore Road in Enmore serves up Vietnamese Food-street food to be specific. It’s borne a tale that sounding more and more familiar lately. Owned by couple Michael and Mai Li, he worked in the world of big bank I.T. and she worked in financial services. They found that there was something missing and found their calling through food. Michael’s father was a chef and they owned a cafe in Kingsgrove where Michael used to help to flip burgers, make shakes and coffee at the tender age of nine. Now they serve Vietnamese banh mi rolls, rice paper wraps and pho.

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The decor is inviting and there is a welcome sight of the banh mi station. All of their breads and pate are made in house and there is a choice of bread or wholemeal rolls for the banh mi while colourful rice paper rolls line the top display. And who is Great Aunty 3? It’s Michael’s 76 year old grandmother whose image features on their website. She was given the number as she is the second eldest in her family (the eldest child is given position number 2, the second oldest is position 3 while apparently the number 1 position is for the parents).

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The menu is simple and on the blackboard and comprises of a variety banh mi and fresh rice paper rolls alongside fresh fruit shakes and Vietnamese iced coffee. The prices, well they’re nothing short of fabulous and although it is small, takeaway is also an option for these portable little foods. Today I’m catching up with friend Reem and her gorgeous baby A and we take a seat at the table opposite the red scooter in deep, comfortable leather arm chairs.

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Vietnamese coffee $4

I start with a Vietnamese coffee, strong and sweet with sweetened condensed milk and ice. Michael hands it over and asks if it is too sweet. It’s sweet but reminds me of my trip to Vietnam. It’s a humid, hot Sydney day and iced is the ideal way to have it.

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Rice paper rolls 3 for $6.80

Reem and I try a few of the rice paper rolls and we go for the vegetarian prawn, duck and chicken & mango. We get two sauces, a vegetarian one and the other sauce with fish in it so that we can see the difference between the two. The vegetarian prawn has the taste and texture of real prawn, the duck is rich and saucey but my favourite was the chicken and mango rice paper roll which had a great range of flavours.

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Berry fruit shake $6 or ($10 with a banh mi as part of a combo deal)

For the banh mi, it wasn’t hard to go past the very recommended filling of slow cooked caramelised pork belly cooked in coconut juice. I decided to try a fruit shake as there was a combo deal where for $10 you got a banh mi roll, a humungous fruit shake and a voucher for a free weekly movie at the nearby DVD store. The berry fruit shake was very refreshing and not overly sweet as it has mainly just fresh fruit and ice in it.

Caramelised pork belly banh mi $6 or ($10 as part of combo deal)

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The Animal, Newtown

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I thought that I might have a bit of an uphill battle pitching a place called “The Animal” for a girl’s weekend lunch. But of course I should underestimate my friends who won’t even ask why a place is called “The Animal” or politely suggest that we go to afternoon tea instead. The Animal restaurant in question is part of the 130 year old Newtown Hotel on King Street in Newtown. The menu has Greek influences from executive chef George Diamond’s Greek heritage. The hotel itself is newly renovated and we make our way upstairs to the Animal which is on the first floor and open for lunch and dinner seven night a week. I’m lunching with Brydie, Celia and Tania.

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I’m not sure how to describe the decor, it’s eclectic at the very least with a converted “purple onion” caravan for the private room. Some of the murals suggest Americana while there are booths, a large table has a comfortable looking couch at one end and chairs surrounding it. Other tables have black and white pictures of Marilyn Monroe printed on them.

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Cushions have pictures of tigers on them and “Welcome to The Jungle” is spray painted on one wall.  The open kitchen has beasts on a spit roast. Upstairs, there’s also a theatre that seats eighteen people where you can order food. Although I’m not drinking as I’m driving, I take a quick peek at the drinks menu which has a sense of humour. There’s a cocktail called “Keith Richards’ Coconut Incident” and “Better Than Jesus.”

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We ask for the recommendations from the waitress. Despite the fact that it’s really quite busy this Sunday afternoon the food arrives quickly.

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Real Taramosalata & Bread $12

I adore taramosalata, the cod roe dip that is creamy and rich with a touch of roe flavour. This is served with warm, grilled flat bread and is an unbeatable combination. Not quite as strong in tarama as I’ve had, it’s thick and creamy and meant for spreading or scooping on the soft triangles of bread.

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Salt Cod Croquettes $16 

The salt cod croquettes came as three to a serve and although our waitress was very enthusiastic and friendly, we wished that she had pointed this out so that we could order four of them (quantities weren’t mentioned on the menu). The croquettes were potato based mixed with salt cod, coated with breadcrumbs and deep fried until golden. They were served with a cauliflower garlic puree as well as burnt butter (although I didn’t really see this) and a salad with greens and red onion.

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Watermelon, feta and mint, pita croutons $14

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