Kepos & Co, Danks St, Waterloo: restaurant review
It’s a metaphor for the times. Once the waiter would stand beside your table and whisk sabayon or flambé crepes. Today, he pounds hummus.
Beside us at Kepos & Co is a man holding a warm mortar against his leg with one hand, a pestle in the other, crafting the chickpea paste à la minute. And that phrase is about the closest this relaxed little Waterloo bistro gets to the old school French-ness and formality of yesteryear dining.
Kepos is about everything the old dining contract was not. Vibrant Mediterranean/Middle Eastern food, served rustically in the middle of the table to share. A kitchen team in full view. A chatty, affable waiter. A transparency inconceivable in the days of silver service and gravy boats. A whole new (food) order.
This is how we eat these days, and Kepos’ food (like that of its nearby sibling, Kepos Street Kitchen) is what we should eat: pulses, grains, seeds, vegetables, spices, fruit, wood-roasted stuff and seemingly everything made from scratch. It’s the kind of food made accessible via the books of Israeli journalist-turned-star-chef Yotam Ottolenghi. And, given how popular they are in Australia, it’s surprising more restaurateurs haven’t borrowed from the Ottolenghi repertoire.
Tel Aviv-born Michael Rantissi may not be quite as famous, but he interprets Middle Eastern food through an Israeli filter with similar panache. A Culinary Institute of America graduate, Rantissi arrived here in 2005 to be sous chef at Balmoral’s Bathers’ Pavilion. Like many chefs who did their time in smart French-based food before returning to their roots, you can feel, and taste, the love. The authenticity.
Back to that hummus. If you’re going to serve something so simple, you need to make it blindingly good. Kepos’ “warm hummus made in a mortar and pestle” is just that. Is it the quality of the chickpeas, garlic and tahini? The cumin? The lemon? The pounding process to finish it all at the table, or the olive oil added at the end? The quality of the loaf it’s served with, straight from a wood oven? Kepos’ version has creamy, complex flavours, a powerful but not imposing sesame lick. It may be just a chickpea dip, but Kepos’ is the best chickpea dip, ever.
The way to eat here is to order the mezze, or selection of shared starters. That way you’ll get something like mutabal, a variation on the wood-roasted eggplant dips you’ll find across the Middle East, here sprinkled with pomegranate and coriander and again, with that beautiful bread, exemplary. Light but powerful. Comforting.
Ignore any “too-much-bread” objections for a long, baguette-shaped pide, baked in the wood oven to a lovely, dappled, charred finish, filled with haloumi, tomato and Turkish spinach and garnished with a “salad” of black olives, diced fresh tomato and fresh herbs. Be happy that your gluttonous guest called for whole roasted baby cauliflower, dressed with cumin, raw tahini and fresh herbs.
Mezze dispensed with, whole snapper baked with a generous “crumble” looks like smashed Coco Pops but is walnut, parsley, oil and the spice twins of Middle Eastern cuisine, cumin and ground coriander. There’s tahini dressing in a pot, and lemon. Great idea but, frankly, not great fish.
Salvation comes in the form of truly excellent cinnamon sugar-dusted chicken bastilla/bisteeya: sweet/savoury Moroccan pie made with filo. It is light, fragrant with the aforementioned spices plus fennel and fresh coriander; the finely minced chicken is a joy.
So, too, is that other renowned sesame product, halva, here in the form of a Middle Eastern version of Eton mess with crumbled brownie and a cigar-shaped macaron with chocolate sauce. Outstanding.
Kepos is hospitable, honest, fresh and (almost without exception) delicious. Your home-made hummus will never be the same again.
Address: Shop 5, 18 Danks Street, Waterloo
Phone: (02) 9690 0931 Web: keposstreetkitchen.com.au
Hours: Lunch Tue-Sun; dinner Tue-Sat
Typical prices: Starters $22; mains $34; desserts $15
Summary: Is that a pestle in your hand?
Like this? Try … Rumi, or Maha, Melbourne
Stars: 3.5 out of 5
Source: The Australian, John Lethlean, 3rd October 2015
Originally published as: Kepos & Co, Danks St, Waterloo: restaurant review
