Abla’s: 109 Elgin Street, Carlton, 9347 0006
My score: 4/5
Every fond word that’s been said about Abla’s is true: there are good reasons why this is one of Melbourne’s best-loved restaurants. The dining room is a simple stage for traditional Lebanese food prepared by a coterie of women who could do it blindfolded. That they don’t, that they take just as much care with the millionth kibbe or green bean as they did with the first is an ordinary miracle, attributable to an embedded belief in the direct pathway between stomach and heart.
It’s hard to avoid the value and variety of the banquet. (I tried, but by the time I got to ordering an eighth dish for our table of two the kindly waitress looked so alarmed I reverted to the set menu.) It starts with a platter of dips that includes a gold standard smoky, textured babaghanoush, continuing with hot, tight little lamb and beef sausages, gorgeous compact kibbeh (minced lamb and pine nuts crusted with cracked wheat and more lamb), and lemony chicken wings with meat that plummets from the bone. A couple of dishes lowered the strike rate: our falafel was a little dry and crumbly and the silverbeet leaves rolled with rice, chickpeas and herbs were undistinguished. But the tomato-braised beans were a piquant recovery, serving as a reminder that cooking greens beyond crispness is not a vegetable crime.
Just as you start to suspect more food will encroach on the dessert stomach, the juicy, unmissable skewered lamb arrives. Lamb also flecks my favourite dish, possibly ever: Abla’s chicken and rice. A moist, warmly spiced pilaf dome, every rice grain glistening, is caressed by shredded white chicken meat. It’s cinnamon-scented almond-studded perfection. Baklava, Turkish delight (fresh, not cloyingly sweet) and sturdy brewed coffee finish it off.
There is nothing new here, no stab at modernity, and Abla’s isn’t the worse for hanging onto a dining room where simplicity has relaxed into dowdiness. Abla Amad, well into her seventies, is still a driving force here and it would be nice to imagine that this will never change. What has shifted is the dining landscape: there are other Melbourne restaurants doing Lebanese food just as well and with more flourish. Of course, few of them have been doing it for so long (though take a bow Almazett) and that’s part of the enormous appeal. Home is where the heart is and for many of us, Abla’s is still the home of Middle Eastern food in Melbourne.
See their website.
Other stayers:
Masani, 313 Drummond Street, Carlton, 9347 5610.
Since 1983, Richard Maisano has been serving regional Italian dishes. On the current menu is cacciucco alla Livornese, a seafood slow stew. Sommelier Kara Maisano picks the 2010 Coriole Fiano from McLaren Vale as the perfect match.
Jacques Reymond, 78 Williams Road, Prahran, 9525 2178.
The Reymond family bought this Victorian mansion in 1992 and its inspirational patriarch has been thinking, cooking, tasting, testing and striving ever since. Come for light, balletic dishes that combine flavours in surprising ways.
Tamani, 156 Toorak Road, South Yarra, 9866 2575.
Cosy and friendly, Tamani has been doing the basic bistro thing since 1967; the ‘new’ owners have been there 13 years. Choose from the antipasto window before moving onto lasagne.
Leave A Comment