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We live and eat in unusual times. Times in which people base their dining and ordering decisions on how good dinner looks on social media. In which many of the things we consume are prefaced with back-stories. In which overwrought philosophies, “concepts” and press releases are starting to feel part and parcel of every opening. Circa 2024, going out to restaurants – and, indeed, writing about them – often requires deciphering some level of marketing encryption.

Thankfully, not every operator feels the need to over-egg the proverbial pudding. Some are happy to give their business straight-shooting names that tell you in no uncertain terms what to expect. Names, for instance, such as Pauly’s Chicken & Ribs. Here, one might assume, is a restaurant owned by someone called Pauly that sells, among other things, chicken and ribs. Case closed. End of story. Except it’s not.

Rather, Pauly’s Chicken & Ribs – a family-friendly takeaway that opened at Noranda Shopping Centre in February – is the newest chapter in the story of Elyas Bahbah and the larger Bahbah clan in Perth. Born in 1960 in Gaza in Palestine, after coming to Australia Elyas, like many migrants, made a living by cooking. Although the Bahbah family patriarch would go on to open numerous businesses celebrating Arab food culture, his most notable contribution to our dining landscape might well be Charcoal Chicken, the Huntingdale restaurant he opened in 2001.

According to Bahbah family lore, the restaurant was WA’s first specialist charcoal chicken joint. While I can’t independently verify these claims, the succulence of the chicken at Pauly’s suggests the Bahbahs are at home behind a barbecue. This is to be expected when you consider Elyas’s son Paul Bahbah – Pauly’s namesake as well as one of its owners – spent school holidays working at his dad’s restaurants where he learned the basics of charcoal cookery. It’s been more than 20 years since Paul’s first shift; he’s cooked a lot of chook. Enough to know how to use charcoal to bless whole birds with maximum juiciness and smoke. But also enough to realise that these days it’s OK to use technology to make the process a little more time-efficient.

Cue the combi-oven: a relatively recent bit of kit that uses steam as well as convectional heat. Bakers love them as steam helps bake bigger breads and pastries with better crusts, but generally people use them to keep things juicy. Or at least they do at Pauly’s, where marinated whole chickens, after getting a preliminary blast of heat and smoke over jarrah coals, get shuffled from the barbie to the oven to finish cooking.

Admittedly, these aren’t the crisp-skinned, made-for-TV chickens that fuel our deepest Sunday roast fantasies, but plump, well-blistered and meaty bits of bird that have, as they say in the movies, seen things. Pauly’s chicken gets finished with two different sauces. The standard-issue birds get smothered in a house-made toum: a lush, miracle-making garlic paste from Lebanon. The “spicy” chickens are glazed with a medium-hot, Portuguese-inspired chilli sauce bright with lemon juice and vinegar.

Juiciness and taste aside, the other thing to note about Pauly’s chicken is that it’s big. Whereas the birds being served at some fast-food chains have been hit hard by shrinkflation (when a product gets smaller while its price stays the same) the chickens here look and feel meaty and of proper weight. Paul tells me he buys free-range number 13 (1.3 kg) birds from Lilydale. Maybe I got lucky the night I visited. Maybe the chickens at Lilydale have undergone some sort of Hulk-like, gamma-ray-related growth spurt of late. Maybe this is the first time in history a man has lied about coq size by saying it’s smaller than it really is. Whatever the case, this is chicken worthy of headliner status.

There’s also an element of the undersell to the restaurant’s other co-star, the lamb ribs. Pauly’s isn’t the only place cooking this once-ignored cut – lamb ribs have been a signature at Fremantle’s Bread in Common from day one and are also cornerstones of Qin’s Lanzhou Beef Noodles outposts – but I’ve never seen lamb ribs as big as these. One reason, I suspect, is that these ribs might not come from lambs but hogget, the not especially cute and certainly hard-to-market name given to a sheep between one and two years old. This extra growing time doesn’t just equal bigger but fuller ribs as the animal sheds baby fat and starts putting muscle on its bones.

The take-home is these ribs are splendid eating: a winning mix of softness and char that comes with being cooked using, once again, both oven and grill. In addition to smoke and steam, the other key is the American-style barbecue sauce they’re glazed with, a sweet, finger-sticking joy that transforms these glossy fingers of flesh into fine rewards for anyone who stayed awake during the previous paragraph’s impromptu lesson in ovine anatomy.

You should, of course, order some sides to go with all this meat. The chips aren’t house-made, but a very good frozen number that’s boxy, golden and crunchy: just the sort of chip you’d hope to find in the deep-fryers of your local fish and chipper. They’re also well salted, even if I didn’t pick out the za’atar spice that Pauly slips into the seasoning. He also low-key channels his Palestinian heritage in the Mediterranean salad by crunching up the greens with some golden-brown chips of fried pita bread: a nod to the Arabic salad, fattoush. Close your eyes and the golden, turmeric-spiked rice made with fluffy, long-grained basmati may remind you of a very good pulao.

But generally speaking, most of the menu plays things with a fairly straight bat, especially when it comes to the classically Australian things. (I suspect Elyas, like many immigrants in the hospitality caper, quickly realised catering to local tastes was crucial). The potato bake is primed with enough cream, white pepper and nostalgia to turn any frown upside down, while the rissole-like quality of the hamburger patty calls to mind the milk-shop burgers of summers past. (Most milk-shop owners, I suspect, wouldn’t char the burger bun as hard as Pauly’s does to offer a contrast to the supple beef.) I also appreciated the fun sweetness sun-dried tomatoes brought to a silky macaroni pasta salad: a little tweak Paul attributes to his chef sisters Catherine and Christine, who also walked the hard yards with their little brother, growing up in the family business.

This time, though, it’s Paul and his brother Nabil upholding the Bahbah’s family name with the brothers’ friend and architect Shivin Bhatia also coming aboard as an owner. While Bhatia’s main contribution is the urban look of the room, Nabil looks after the front-of-house and the restaurant’s team of young but eager staff. While the restaurant has space for around 20, most of its business is takeaway or delivery, although if you do manage to snag a table, your food will be served in proper bowls and you’ll be provided with share plates. (Takeaway restaurants serving dine-in guests food in takeaway containers is a pet peeve of mine, although I can, begrudgingly, understand the financial reasons.)

I wish I lived closer to Pauly’s, and didn’t have to drive half an hour and across the river to eat here. Meat cooked over fire is a thing of joy and one of the food world’s real pleasures that’s loved almost universally. Pauly’s take on the genre is fresh, fun and accessible and one of many examples of how second-generation cooks rethinking their culinary heritage yields big wins for all. The food here isn’t exactly cheap-cheap, but you get more than you pay for. Sometimes literally, after we took home a box of leftovers having (unsuccessfully) tackled the $89.95 Doublemaker Deal as a group of three adults and two kids. In these uncertain times, Pauly’s is the kind of family-friendly – and family-run – restaurant that reminds us how enjoyable eating out can be.