First Look: Aambra Took Three Years To Open Inside a 120-Year-Old Rose Bay Church

Greek food hit its Sydney stride this year. And September delivered a wave of Chinese restaurants, with Grandfathers, Young’s Palace and Lee Ho Fook opening in quick succession. And while these cuisines are well represented across Sydney, it’s hard not to notice a clear trend. The very same can be said for the flavours of Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine and beyond. Levantine food is on the up, Sydney, and Rose Bay’s Aambra is the latest arrival.

“Levantine cuisine has been a very untapped market in Sydney,” executive chef Gianluca Lonati says. “It seems like this year’s the year everyone’s jumping on it.” He’s right. The Bentley team’s Watermans opens today, and London’s The Palomar landed in Paddington last month. Wine bar Caness joined Oxford Street in May, along with Mixed Business above Emma’s Snack Bar in Enmore. And Iftar opened to immediate buzz in Merrylands.

“The first one that put Levantine on the map was Noma,” says Lonati, who was most recently at Nour in Surry Hills, where he was head chef for four years. “There’s always been a lot of similarities between Middle Eastern food and Italian food. It’s the same culture – all about the generous flavours, abundance and looking at food as a means of bringing people together.”

It makes sense, then, to bring this culture to Rose Bay’s former Uniting Church, where people gathered for 120 years until the final service in 2008. When Aambra’s owner Cristian Gorgees saw the building was for sale, he snapped it up in 20 minutes – then spent three years doing it up.

Walking in, all eyes are on the technicolour stained-glass windows, restored to their former glory beneath lofty vaulted ceilings. Sit inside the timber space, with peach and burgundy marbling and a giant brass light sculpture backdropped by the open kitchen. Or, sink into lounge seating outside on the verandah dotted with olive trees.

The spectacular setting finds its way into the food. “My favourite part of the [space] is the windows, which we’re re-creating in one of the dishes – the tuna kibbeh nayeh,” says Lonati. “[It’s] usually done with lamb backstrap, but we wanted to put more focus on the seafood of the region. So we use tuna instead of lamb, and we mix it up with comino spice (cumin) and bulgur. We use a mould and different flavoured oils to make it look exactly like the stained-glass window.”

Aambra’s menu travels along the Levantine coast – from Turkey to Lebanon and across to Cyprus – and to the wider region. Order flatbread brushed with three kinds of molasses (pomegranate, date and blackstrap), and dolma done differently: sesame leaves replace vine leaves, hugging heavily spiced scallop-laden rice.

Come the mains, Gorgees’s Iraqi heritage gets a nod. Masgouf is a dish his grandmother cooked every Sunday; here, Queensland blue groper steals the show from traditional freshwater carp. It lands butterflied and flame-grilled alongside a tangy mix of tamarind, tomato, fenugreek and onion. Other stars include the Margra lamb saddle stuffed with makanek (Levantine sausage) mince, and a dry-aged duck on a pile of mujadara (lentils and rice) laced with caramelised onion.

A cabernet blend from Lebanon’s Chateau Musar is just one of 130 drops on sommelier Sasa Savic’s wine list, which covers both big names and lesser known producers. Meanwhile, cocktails play with spice and citrus, from the Jaffa Margarita to the arak elderflower spritz.

Aambra
518A Old South Head Road, Rose Bay

Hours:
Tue & Wed 5pm–10pm
Thu 11.30am–10pm
Fri to Sun 11.30am–11pm

aambra.com.au
@aambrarosebay