Ballaboosta Burnside | SA Weekend restaurant review

A much larger offshoot of a city favourite, this new eastern suburbs eatery offers homely food with enough space to feed the whole family.

Ballaboosta’s pitas spread across the room like little balloons at a children’s party. Every plate ferried by the waiting staff – from the dips and salads, to fish and falafel – seems to feature one of these puffy flatbreads riding shotgun on the side.

And given the new iteration of this likeable, loosely Middle Eastern restaurant is much larger than the original, it’s a good thing that the oven in which the pitas magically swell with hot air is also significantly bigger.

The first Ballaboosta, a former laundromat off Hutt St, is a narrow room with a traditional dome-shaped oven in the midst of the tables.

For their expansion into the eastern suburbs, owners Naj Moubayed and Mensur Delkic have much more space to play with. They have taken over a former cafe, just off Greenhill Rd on the way to Waterfall Gully, with twice as many seats inside, as well as a substantial veranda.

The interior design follows similar cues to the original: exposed brick and concrete walls, some nice pieces of timber, particularly in a super-sized share table that stretches the length of the dining room. The vibe, of course, is different: the small-bar-style energy of the city compared with a more open space where everyone can move about with ease and the volume is lower. It’s a matter of preference, really.

And the oven is not such a feature here either, at least until you look for it. Built into a corner at the back of the open kitchen, the huge red-brick structure looks almost medieval, as if it was once used to bake the bread for a village.

A quick scan of the menu reveals why the oven needs to be this size. From breakfast eggs to pizzas and even a few of the salads, the words “wood-fired” are a constant feature. And that’s before you consider the pita.

Most of these options are split between two sections. The smaller mezze, at a set price of $12, can be combined into a feast with friends. Main-sized plates are listed under the title “Betty’s Kitchen” – a tribute to Naj’s mum, the matriarch of a family with a strong heritage in Adelaide dining. She, then, is the ballaboosta, a lovely Yiddish word for a superior hostess or homemaker.

Struggling to choose from all of this, we enlist expert guidance from a passing waiter. She rightly recommends the “sambousik”, little crimped pasties of short, almost crumbly pastry filled with a fragrant mix of spiced lamb mince, pine nuts and caramelised onion. A splodge of hummus on the side should be applied in judicious amounts, if at all, leaving plenty to wipe up with the obligatory pita.

A big bowl of “charred” cauliflower looks as if they have been to a solarium, so even is the tan across the dimpled surface of the florets. They have been splattered with an extra tangy (and garlicky) lemon and tahini sauce. It’s healthy snacking at its best.

A similar tahini-based sauce, this one flecked with herbs, blankets a thick fillet of barramundi that, as my seafood-expert mate confirms, is cooked “on point”. The only query is whether a sauce as powerful as this, and used in such liberal quantities, is too much for the fish. Maybe.

I’ve left the best to last. Cabbage rolls are everything you might expect of a dish from “Betty’s Kitchen” – nourishing, cooked with love, soothing like a mother’s gentle whispers. The lamb and rice filling is fragrant with seven spices – cinnamon and nutmeg among them. It is rolled in a cabbage leaf that, after braising for hours in a lemony broth, has turned from the humblest of ingredients to the height of silken luxury.

As much as I’d like to tell you about dessert, all the interesting ones such as the filo and custard “knafeh” or orange blossom pudding “ashtalia” are strangely not available, leaving a choice of a cheesecake or banana caramel pie.

What a shame. We could have fitted in an extra pita after all.