Inside the 12-Dish Menu Oscar Solomon Is Cooking Over Coals at Firepop

As part of this year’s Dine Out festival, presented by DoorDash, one of the program’s hottest events will see two of Sydney’s most exciting chefs join forces over hot coals. For one night only, Firepop head chef Raymond Hou welcomes Apollo Group chef Oscar Solomon into his kitchen for a 12-dish set menu takeover on July 29 as part of the venue’s ongoing Pop Stars series.

“The idea is to invite chefs to cook together with us, where we usually create three different skewers that we cook on the fire and offer them alongside the usual menu. I’ve been running my own kitchen for a very long time, so I’m super excited to meet [new] chefs and taste what they do,” Hou says. “It’s super fun”.

If you’re not across it already, Hou’s Firepop is a sleek, fire-focused restaurant off Enmore Road. The venue is built around the sizzling energy and rhythm of fire, zesty bites and smoking coals. Since establishing Firepop two years ago, he and partner Alina Van have remained committed to pushing the boundaries of charcoal cooking while staying true to their core philosophy: cooking exceptional produce over open flames.

The venue also happens to be down the road from Solomon’s house.

“I popped in last night on the way home from work, and it was such a vibe. Long charcoal grills, little bits cooked over charcoal … it’s kind of a dream kitchen for me,” Solomon says. “The space is beautiful. I’m pretty excited.”

Having cooked Japanese and Greek food for the last eight years, Solomon uses fire as an essential tool in his cooking craft. “Both cuisines share a real reverence for cooking over coals,” he says. His menu for the night – which he jokingly calls “a pretty strange spread” – reads Japanese overall, with native Australian ingredients running through it.

Solomon says Australian native ingredients are his favourite thing to cook with. “I feel really strongly about Australian food identity, so it felt wrong not to have that in there. It’s a bit of an ‘all the food I’ve cooked over the years’ moment – a nice spread of everything, basically,” he says.

Modelled on Firepop’s own 12-dish menu, the $125 per person collaboration is cooked almost entirely over hot coals and open flames, with a quality Solomon calls “Oscar-ness”. It begins with a chicken dashi broth with grilled lemon sorrel – “soft and acidic, with lively texture on the leaf” – finished with a drizzle of chilli oil. Then, there’s a Japanese-style chicken meatball skewer, a ham-and-butter sandwich inspired by the classic jambon-beurre, and chicken oyster skewers paired with grilled pineapple and sansho pepper. A vegetable skewer reimagines French leeks vinaigrette, with leeks cooked in kombu butter and saké, finished over charcoal and served with a mandarin kosho hollandaise.

With Firepop’s regular Thursday-night live music setting the soundtrack, expect the same high-energy atmosphere Solomon is known for. “I want to have a real party in the suburb I live in,” he says. "It’s an explosion of all the things I’ve been working on over the years of cooking.”

Hou, meanwhile, is continuing to evolve Firepop with a new menu and a recently upgraded open-flame grill. If this collaboration is any indication, the restaurant is only getting bigger, bolder and hotter.

You can secure your table now, through the DoorDash reservations platform, while spots last.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with DoorDash. Broadsheet’s Dine Out festival returns from July 20–26, 2026 in Melbourne and July 27–August 2, 2026 in Sydney, with 100 events across the two cities.