Score: 14.5/20

THE first time I met Joseph Abboud, he was living in Kilmore eking out a living at his first restaurant, a commercially prudent kind of place designed around an inoffensive mod-Oz menu. I vaguely remember steak, maybe something to do with a chicken breast. It was the sort of meal that was OK but hardly impressive enough to bother the memory box, and the restaurant folded after about a year.

To see him pop up five years later in East Brunswick, cooking his Lebanese ancestors’ food and receiving the kind of reviews most owner-chefs can only dream about (‘‘a gem’’; ‘‘love at first sight’’), just goes to show there might be some kernel of truth in that annoying new-age notion about being true to yourself.

Abboud’s personal reinvention helped ignite many a Melburnian’s love affair (this one included) with the subtle, aromatic and dusky flavours known generically as Middle Eastern. We learnt about labneh, tahini and zaatar, the mysteries of fatteh, and that shanklish isn’t a sheep’s body part.

But even though we’re better educated these days, the food of the Levant is still widely pigeonholed as grain-driven peasant food supplemented with baba ghanoush, tabouleh and hummus. It doesn’t have a reputation for being friendly to repeated road-testing. So the really pleasing thing about my latest visit to Rumi is that, despite the familiarity of a number of dishes on the single-page menu, there’s also an invigorating whack of new stuff.

Abboud isn’t using his classical training to go all crazily experimental on the freekeh, either. If anything, he’s going back in time for inspiration, trawling through the foodie cultural archives to come up with gems  such as the sauce of caraway, garlic and green herbs he teams with the grilled lamb’s tongue ($10.50), one of the dishes that proves he’s still evolving and refining. It’s a simple yet masterful meeting of texture, flavour and colour: slices of tongue, first poached into softness with pomegranate molasses then grilled; chewy cubes of sujuk, the spicy Turkish sausage; the nicely acidic Middle Eastern salsa verde; the warm crunch of toasted almonds on top. Surprising in the best possible way.

Rumi decamped a year ago to larger premises a block along Lygon Street. It’s easy to see why — a kitchen that isn’t the size of a shoebox, for starters — but I miss the old shop-front now occupied by the great Sicilian joint Bar Idda. It has more natural charm than this converted bank building with polished boards and a big central bar, but the rest has been transplanted: the wooden school chairs, the green glass carafes, the burnished silver drinks trays and the little copper coffee pots.

 The lines of poetry by Khalil Gibran inscribed on the wall at the old place are now etched into wooden screens, the only major style statement in a room that I’m told is aesthetically closer to places you would find in Beirut than Rumi mark one.
For a first-timer, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the stalwarts: meatballs in a rich tomato and saffron sauce with a drizzle of yoghurt ($11.50); fried lobes of cauliflower with pine nuts, currants and caramelised onion ($11); the neat little house-made sausages with garlicky, lemony toum sauce ($13.50). And even the recidivists will make a beeline for the sigara boregi — brik pastry-wrapped cigars of soft melting cheeses (feta, haloumi and kasseri) with a touch of oregano — that will make you thank God/Allah/Yahweh for the Levant.

Then there’s the new stuff, such as koussa salad ($11.50): halved white Lebanese zucchinis, shanklish and mint; hazelnuts and nigella seeds providing a toasty base. Another texturally beautiful salad comprises whipped Bulgarian sheep’s feta with walnuts, grapes and chips made from flatbread ($11.50). A Lebanese-style kingfish tartare with assertively tart red onions soaked overnight in red wine vinegar is also served with those flatbread chips ($16); while the simple, addictive snack of a rustling plate of whole fried school prawns comes with tahini taratoor ($15.50).

There are only two dishes the size of your conventional main and both are best shared. The lamb shoulder ($19.50) is cooked long and slow so it arrives filing for divorce from the bone, the meat’s surface spiced with advieh (a Persian spice mix with rose petals and dried limes plus your more usual cumin and coriander) to form a wicked dark crust. Alongside, there’s a viscous, vibrant mint sauce in a little silver pot. The barbecued quail ($19.50) arrives on two metal skewers — breasts on one, legs on the other — with chopped barberries for a successful sweet-sour combo. The only disappointment is the cold and uninspiring flatbread that arrives rolled up in a metal container.

Then there’s the other stuff: a silken dish of eggplant puddling about with tomato ($12); a cos, radish and herb salad ($9.50) with an intriguing sweetish dressing; desserts that aren’t the final nail in the overstuffed coffin but savoury-sweet little things such as medjool dates filled with labneh and  scattered with crushed halva ($8).

Rumi might have moved house but it hasn’t neglected its menu as it moves up in the world. The Lebanese stalwart Abla’s  is the rare kind of place socially sanctioned to cement its menu sometime around the mid-1970s; Rumi, run by a mid-career chef, would, you’d hope, still show innovation and a sense of excitement in mining the complexities of an intriguing cuisine. And it does.

SOURCE: Epicure