First Look: The Falastini Food Truck Founder Reinterprets Her Family’s Recipes at Cafe Beit Siti

Rahaf Al Khatib’s grandmother always had a table full of food. In the mornings it would be set with strawberry jam, labneh and bread, served alongside za’atar, olive oil and fresh cheese. Or galayet bandora, a warming dish of pan-fried tomatoes sauteed with garlic, chilli and cumin.

“She was such a great cook – she was known in her family for her love of cooking and baking,” says Al Khatib, who’s continuing her grandmother’s legacy at her homey new Palestinian cafe in Coburg.

It’s called Beit Siti (“grandmother’s home” in Arabic) and those formative dishes are referenced throughout the halal menu – including in a flaky golden danish that’s filled with strawberry, pomegranate and molasses jam and topped with tangy thick labneh.

A savoury danish riffs on musakhan. That dish is usually roasted chicken with sumac, onion and flatbread, as Al Khatib would serve it from her Falastini food truck , but it’s done here as a pastry with sweet confit onion and baked cauliflower florets, which her grandma sometimes subbed in for chicken.

For now, the focus is pastries and coffee (the Constance coffee beans are roasted just two kilometres down the road), but Al Khatib will soon introduce all-day breakfast boards named after her grandma (Jamal) and mum (Jamileh), both of whom have passed. They’ll feature home-style meze like ful medames (creamy fava beans with tahini); olives and pickles; labneh, za’atar and olive oil for dipping; hummus topped with lamb mince or chickpeas; and that galayet bandora.

“Mum preferred a more vegetarian-based brekkie, but Teta [grandma] did the full breakfast every chance she got,” says Al Khatib.

The cafe, like her food truck and dining pop-ups before it, is a way to preserve her mother and grandmother’s recipes. But it’s also a space to share her culture as a 1.5 generation (people who moved to a different country before adulthood) Palestinian who was born in Jordan and came to Australia when she was four.

Take the croissants, which are made in-house using Pepe Saya butter and are filled with cheese and chicken mortadella – a throwback to the halal-friendly cold-cut she grew up eating. “That so quintessentially reminds me of being a child.”

She knows some members of the community will be expecting traditional Palestinian food, perhaps like their own grandmothers made. But Al Khatib says she’s cooking from her perspective as a “third-culture kid”.

“ Al Alamy is great, A1 Bakery is amazing, I don’t need to do that. I love to bake, and croissants have been my hyper-fixation for ages now.

“But also, my grandma was serving us this food on croissants because that’s what you could buy at Woolies.”

From the food to the fit-out, Beit Siti is a deeply personal endeavour. Visitors can flick through books on traditional jewellery and embroidery (a nod to Al Khatib’s teta Jamal, who was a seamstress) and join workshops on labneh-making, olive-preserving, pickling and fermentation. A beautiful wedding scene tapestry on the wall was made by women in a refugee camp in the West Bank. The piece came via a friend, who’s empowering women in Palestine by selling their work through Tulkarm Made on Instagram to help them make an income.

The space will continue to evolve, with plants, art, tapestries and a pantry section on the way. “The fit-out was all DIY, and mostly done by the community – allies, people from the Palestinian community, people who live locally. They would show up after work and on weekends. This community really wrapped its arms around us.”

And she wants to do the same in return. “This is the most meaningful thing I could do for my community – to give them a space where they don’t have to ask for permission to be themselves,” says Al Khatib. “Especially for people who don’t have access to their family, because they’re different or queer or they just live far away. This is a space where you can come for a sense of home and hospitality.”

Beit Siti
150 Bell Street, Coburg
No phone

Hours
Mon to Sat 7.30am–3pm
Sun 8am–2pm

@beit.siti