Nomad, Sydney review: it’s like a haute Middle Eastern picnic

Nomad, a Middle Eastern joint in Sydney’s Surry Hills, is like a haute picnic with table service.

Homely: inside Nomad

When our bread comes to the table it’s a thing of great beauty. Yes, I’m talking about Nomad’s famous flatbread: charry, dusted with Middle Eastern spices and seeds, and gloriously puffed up. “It looks like an edible whoopee cushion,” says Irish. It’s why I like bringing him to lunch; everybody needs a mate with a great turn of phrase, and it helps that he loves food. Particularly this food. He describes Nomad as being like a picnic with waiter service, and he’s not wrong. “I love eating like this,” he says more than once, and so do I. Most of us do.

We eat with our fingers, we use the bread like cutlery, we make little sandwiches with all sorts of different morsels scattered before us, mix and match. We dunk and smear and lick our greasy fingers, but still leave oily fingerprints on the wine glasses. We find a very calm, satisfying place down the back of this super, old Surry Hills space.

It might not have been so. Some kitchen fires end dreams, but when it happened at Nomad in September 2019, forcing an evacuation of the four-storey inner-Sydney building, the restaurant’s owner quickly declared the place would be fixed, re-opened. He took a temporary lease on the old Longrain site nearby, stocked the pantry and opened Nomad Up the Road as a stopgap, reopening back in Foster Street last January. You’d need to be a hardcore regular to pick that Nomad’s site was a charred dish itself 20 months ago.

We arrive without a booking only to bump into head chef Jacqui Challinor wearing an outfit unsuited to the charring of Middle Eastern bread. “I’m an office chef these days,” she says, which might refer to the imminent launch of a Nomad sibling in Melbourne. In either case, it sets an interesting scenario: we know she’s not in the kitchen, and she knows there’s a restaurant reviewer in the house.

I like the dynamic. And she has every reason to feel confident about the arrangement. The food comes to our timber table in excellent shape, haute snacks with a faintly Middle Eastern accent.

That bread, of course, anchors all the dishes: glossy leaves of fenugreek-spiced Petuna ocean trout, cold-smoked to a lovely burnt-orange hue, the texture firm, the flavour superb; pale pink fronds of thinly sliced duck mortadella, fragrant with coriander seed; the cleverest little white sesame-crusted falafel revealing whole, pitted, piquant and acidic green olives within. The way the fruit works with the fried, spiced pulse mix is fantastic, like a seasoning. All we’re missing is flies, dogs and arguing children; the campfire is definitely burning over in the kitchen.

Modestly smoked Tasmanian mussels arrive in an olive oil and espelette pepper dressing, with the other half of the robust ceramic dish given over to cream-coloured toum, the tangy Lebanese garlic emulsion. Instead of bread, we have a too-thin cake of hash brown, the crust a little too oily for me, the texture of the hash brown dominated by crunch rather than the unique texture of cooked, shredded potato.

Next out of the picnic basket is a skewer of thin-sliced Wagyu tongue: it’s crisp from the char grill, sweet from a date glaze, perky from a baharat spice dusting and altogether excellent on its mattress of house-made yoghurt.

Olive oil ice-cream sandwich

Reluctantly, we concede it’s cutlery time: on a bed of white onion soubise (a paste-like sauce) is a char-grilled baby octopus salad with pickled fennel, chives and thinly sliced radish. It’s fresh, clean, inventive and homely at the same time. More whoopee cushion? Tempting.

But choices lead us instead to an olive oil ice-cream sandwich with brik pastry, scattered generously with halva, slivered pistachios and honeycomb. It’s a lovely dish channelling the chef’s Middle Eastern muse.

Service is fine without setting the world on fire, but the wine list – full of interest, with excellent house vino made by Simon Gilbert at Mudgee – makes up for it.

Do it. No rug required.

NOMAD

ADDRESS: 16 Foster St, Surry Hills, NSW

CONTACT: [phone]; nomad.sydney

HOURS: Lunch Wed-Sun; dinner daily

TYPICAL PRICES: Snacks $15, small $30, large $55, desserts $22

LIKE THIS? TRY... Propeller, Perth; Gerard’s Bistro, Brisbane

TAKEAWAY: During lockdown, order and pick up a banquet for 2 ($120, Wed-Sat); see website for nightly set menu

STARS out of 5: Three-and-a-half stars