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In a high-ceilinged Marrickville warehouse, with a poultry distributor for a neighbour, Baba’s Place is doing many things you’d be stretched to find elsewhere.

It is, almost certainly, the only public space in Sydney where you can listen to Mazzy Star and eat gelato drizzled with Lebanese olive oil. I don’t know of another independent restaurant with a full-time art director, either, or a website with blog posts referencing Albert Camus, Kendrick Lamar and Migrant Housing by architecture professor Mirjana Lozanovska.

While it also runs a creative agency and often hosts DJs and visual artists, Baba’s Place fundamentally – importantly – still exists to serve delicious food. What kind of food, exactly, could be the focus of a rollicking thesis taking in white dips, Red Lea chips and backyard cucumbers; potato noodles, instant noodles and the Filet-O-Fish; ladies’ fingers; cevapcici; baldiye cheese; cumin-thumping skewers and Firebrand charcoal.

“The expansion of suburban cuisine will be the most significant development in Sydney dining over the next decade. In this essay, I will …”

When Baba’s Place began piping VoVo-pink taramasalata on shokupan milk-bread four years ago, south-west-Sydney-raised co-founders Alex Kelly and Jean-Paul El Tom (who have Macedonian and Lebanese families, respectively) described their cuisine as “wog”. While on a fact-checking phone call, Kelly told me Baba’s more recently began widening the concept of “suburban cuisine” to include other cultures in an attempt to create something genuinely new, something that may be at odds with a simple definition like “contemporary” or “French”.

“Mirjana Lozanovska spoke at an Adidas party we had last year, and she really inspired me by saying that perhaps suburban cuisine isn’t one of definition, but one of exploration.” (Naturally, this also means reconciling the concept of suburbia itself, but then we’re probably getting a bit off-topic for a restaurant review column. In this context, it’s essentially shorthand for Western Sydney. Palm Beach is a suburb, but it ain’t suburbia.)

A confit tuna loin ($32) is gently cooked in oil with garlic and various aromatics until it just starts to flake. Inspired by the myriad types of tinned fish native to Europe and reinforced with roast fennel puree and snappy slices of asparagus and lupin beans, the dish was developed by Michael Lo Presti, who jumped over from Stanmore’s three-hatted Sixpenny to help lead the kitchen last year.

“Hot-and-cold eggplant”, meanwhile, is captained by El Tom and riffs on a grilled eggplant sandwich his grandmother was highly fond of. Eighteen dollars buys you a stack of eggplants cooked to varying textures and temperatures, tied together by cashew cream and a cap of pulpy, black-peppery tomatoes. Vital and very tasty.

Something else I really dig about Baba’s – in addition to its plastic-on-lace tablecloths, house-made yoghurt and chewy sticky-date pudding ($16) – is that you can book a Friday-night sitting for 9.30pm. This is exactly what I did the other week, and the room was heaving with more energy than most CBD restaurants at that time – a crowd fuelled by the signature tarama on toast with whey-pickled cucumbers ($14) and briny rakija martinis ($23).

Restaurant manager Rachael Trewin has compiled a smashing drinks list with plenty of fun gear from “the motherland”, taking in Georgia, Croatia and Greece, plus Lebanon’s Mersel Wine with an apricot-forward bottling made from light-skinned indigenous merwah grapes ($75). It works a treat with the beef tartare ($28), which harnesses fermented daikon, blackened corn kernels, corn puree and a barnstorming corn-based hot sauce. The wine also has enough grip to get in the ring with a tremendously juicy lamb forequarter chop ($50) that’s glazed in leftover whey (a nod to the Middle East’s and Europe’s great lamb and yoghurt dishes), charcoal-grilled and finished with whey-enhanced butter and the kind of common garden sorrel found in Rockdale backyards.

At a Friday 9.30pm sitting, the room was heaving with more energy than most CBD restaurants at that time.

It takes a committed team to explore the concept of suburban cuisine and shout-outs should also go to Baba’s other business partners, Joy-Della El Tom, James Bellos and Zaal Kaboli. In addition to achieving a hat for the first time, Baba’s Place was named as the inaugural Bill Granger Trailblazer in The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, published last month. Introduced to honour Granger’s legacy after the cook and restaurateur passed away last year, the award is for a person or group approaching hospitality from their own perspective and pushing Australian food forward. Cod roe dip on Japanese milk-bread … it could be the next generation’s avocado toast.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine