Smoky Cravings

Rocky Benzon says no matter where you go in the Philippines, there’s a barbeque stall every 50 metres. In Sydney? Benzon has the market covered.

Be it in Parramatta, Tempe or Campsie, Smoky Cravings is where swathes of the city’s Filipino community get their inihaw fix. They come for the skewers of pork, lamb and chicken drenched in a sticky soy glaze and fired over charcoal. “Extremely addictive” is what the SK menu cautions. No doubt there’s some truth to the claim.

Benzon and his wife moved to Australia from the Philippines in 2012, and started selling inihaw products wholesale to Filipino grocers all over the city. The couple bought a food truck shortly before the pandemic, pulling up at Paddy’s Night Food Market in Flemington once a month before opening the original Smoky Cravings in Lakemba in 2021.

Campsie is now the flagship, and serves as both a family-friendly diner and production kitchen for Rocky’s Barbesqew products. There’s a tiled dining room up front, and a spacious courtyard out back that delivers the open-air dining style synonymous with Filipino street food and the Lakemba original.

Most diners go for either the barbequed quarter inasal chicken or a three-skewer selection, served with a mound of adobo rice and a small bowl of beef broth. Offal is very much a thing here, and you can try skewers of pork or chicken intestines, pork liver and pork ear. Classic Filipino dishes such as sisig, savoury-sweet spaghetti and halo-halo – a shaved ice dessert – are also on the cards.