Aalia offers sophisticated Middle Eastern cuisine in elegant surroundings and with excellent service. I never trust TripAdvisor when I’m looking for a restaurant, but I happened to realize in hindsight that at that time at least, it was the number one restaurant in town. It may be an exaggeration, but it’s still a safe bet.

When I was drawing up the program for this trip to Australia, I quickly identified Aalia’s as a restaurant that ticked a number of boxes for me: I hadn’t been there yet, I really like Middle Eastern cuisine, and it was always mentioned in any food or lifestyle magazine/blog about the city. So I saved it for the last dinner of this trip, and I’m glad I did. If I’d switched, and ended up with Manta the day after Aalia, I’d have left Australia on a slightly disappointing note.

You’ll find a summary of the articles about this trip to Australia at the bottom of the page.

The concept

Aalia is a restaurant that blends the fundamentals and flavors of Middle Eastern cuisine with trends in Australian fine dining.

I mentioned TripAdvisor above, but while the Michelin guide still doesn’t exist in Australia, it has been awarded two toques by Gourmet Traveler (a kind of local Michelin), which voted it the best gourmet restaurant in New South Wales in 2023.

The setting

To begin with, the restaurant is located in a large inner courtyard surrounded by large office buildings and luxury shops. Users of the terraces of the properties that share this open-air space can rest assured that they won’t be inconvenienced by the crowds on the street, let alone the traffic.

For the record, the logo is so illegible that I walked past it twice without recognizing it, before stopping and reading the menu outside to make sure I was in the right place.

Inside, it’s sober, airy and uncluttered, almost Scandinavian in style, with lots of wood and just a few shiny, flashy elements to remind us of the restaurant’s theme…but very little and it’s all very tasty.

The property has a beautiful open kitchen.

What’s more, contrary to an overly pronounced trend in so-called trendy properties, not only is the room not at all dark, but the electro music in the background is muted.

The menu

It’s typically Middle Eastern, with the occasional borrowing from more local ingredients, mainly seafood.

The dinner

As soon as I arrive, I’m taken care of and accompanied to my table.

The waiter brings me the menu…it’s hard to decide. I know that in this type of cuisine it’s often the norm to share several dishes, so I ask about quantities to see what I can order. He advises me, lets me think about it over an aperitif (a negroni, of course) and I finally place my order.

Leaving my ear to the ground, it seems to me that some of the staff speak French to each other, and I’m pretty sure I detected a French accent in the waitress who took the order from the next table.

And she’s the one who brings me my starter. Quail skewer, molokhia, barberry and king prawn skewer, tamarind, tarama.

The quail skewer is fine and melt-in-the-mouth, a blend of many flavors, a real treat.

It was a little more difficult to tackle the king prawn skewer, which required a bit of dexterity to suck the head off. The tamara blends with iodized flavors, and it’s excellent. The cooking is perfect and the combination of oil, tamara and lemon gives a fresh, spicy taste that I really appreciate.

It’s light and delicate, which surprised me coming from a cuisine that, however delicious, tends to quickly fill your stomach. I could have done with a couple more skewers after all…

The waitress who’s now in charge of my table stops by several times to ask me if everything’s going well. Finally, she asks me if I’m French… ” Uh yes, and I think you are too“. We switch languages to continue the conversation. She’s been here for 7 years, and has just obtained her passport. She tells me that her Australian colleagues sent her to my table to check that I was French, because they weren’t too sure: “pleasant, polite, funny and excellent English…they had a doubt“. I’m happy to accept the compliment, but it makes me a little sad about the image we can have abroad. Anyway.

Anyway, we’ll be chatting all through dinner and it’ll be great fun.

Next comes my dish. Shawarma lamb neck, terator, pickles, Saida saj.

The dish is served to me “normally”, but the waiter removes a bit of flesh from the bone with a knife to show me how melting it is after cooking for hours overnight.

Just smelling it is a real pleasure! On the palate, it’s really melting. The spices in the dish are fresh and spicy at the same time, and condiments are offered alongside the dish so that everyone can adapt the seasoning to their own taste.

At the end, I can confirm that the meat has peeled off on its own without any effort and the bone is bare.

At this point I call my favorite waitress for help in choosing my dessert.

Agreeing with me that Middle Eastern desserts are sometimes “a little” heavy on sugar, she will present each dessert to me one by one and recommend the Sfouf with turmeric, carrot ice cream and mace.

I was right to trust her. The carrot cheese cream is as good as it is surprising to find carrots in a dessert. In any case, it’s a light, delicate dessert that brings this dinner to a perfect close.

Well… almost closed, because as this was my last evening here before returning to Europe, everything went well and the staff were lovely, I’ll be adding a Hennessy xo cognac and a Chai Masala tea that I discovered on the occasion. Hennessy remains a safe bet, and the tea will be spicy and flavorful without being heavy.

Anecdotally, while chatting with the waitress, she told me that now that she has her Australian passport, she’s thinking of going elsewhere and discovering another country. We talked about the fact that when you’ve worked so hard for so long to get something, and you can’t deviate from the plan, once you’ve got what you wanted there’s a kind of decompression that means it doesn’t really matter anymore. What mattered was the passport to complete a cycle, not necessarily to stay. This reminds me, in a different vein, of obtaining Flying Blue lifetime Platinum status and turning to the competition to compensate for an overdose of flights on the same airlines for over 10 years. When I tell her about it, she bursts out laughing: her father stopped flying with Air France Co the day he got his lifetime status.

Anyway.

In the end, the bill came to 90 euros, 10 less than the day before at Manta, for a dinner that seemed barely acceptable at the time and, in retrospect, rather disappointing after tonight’s meal.

The service

What can I add to what I said earlier? All the staff, not just the one who took special care of me, were more than adorable and very efficient. No gaps in the service, a constant pace neither too fast nor too slow, sound and pertinent advice. If I’d known, I’d have come here for dinner the day before too.

Bottom Line

An excellent dinner to round off this Australian trip in the most beautiful way. As I was saying, I don’t know if the #1 Tripadvisor spot is deserved or if it’s the best gastronomic restaurant in the region, because there are some excellent restaurants in Sydney, but it doesn’t really matter. Whether it’s 1st or 10th best, it’s an excellent property that will appeal even to those who aren’t fans of Middle Eastern cuisine or don’t know it well.

By way of comparison, and in a similar style of cuisine, I ate at Nour in Sydney last year. Aalia is really a notch above: finer, more qualitative service, much more subdued atmosphere and less “show off”…admittedly Nour was a little less expensive but in a hurry to leave the hubbub I didn’t add anything after dessert, so it must be worth it. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t even ask.

The articles about this trip to Australia

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Restaurant Nour in Sydney: a fine Middle Eastern cuisine, a very (too?) lively restaurant Mekong restaurant in Sydney: good dishes but catastrophic service Manta restaurant in Sydney: decent food but service not up to scratch