Where Kate Grenville goes for Turkish home cooking in Sydney

WHY I LOVE THIS PLACE

WHO
Kate Grenville, author,

WHERE
Le Cafeier, Balmain.

WHY
"I've never been to Turkey, but what I think the large, cheerful chef is producing out of his minuscule kitchen is a version of Turkish home cooking. That's why my friend and I keep coming back – this is real food, made with skill and taking delight in good ingredients. It certainly isn't the standard fare of so many Balmain cafes, but it also doesn't make a song and dance about how exotic it is. You get the feeling this is just the food the owners and the chef know and love."

WHAT
"I have an early lunch there nearly every week, usually with a friend who's a local GP. In her short lunch hour we can have a quick meal and both go back to work fortified for the afternoon by great food and excellent coffee.

"My friend always has the meat and vegetable soup – an unglamorous name for a gloriously rich broth full of generous chunks of beef and plenty of vegetables. It's got the taste of the long-cooked home cooking your mother used to make. I love it too, but I also love their char-grilled chicken, which comes with roasted baby carrots and fennel, olives and hummus, served on a wooden platter. The Turkish-slanted salads are also great – the lamb backstrap salad or the falafel salad are my favourites. Whatever is on the blackboard specials list is sure to be good.

"My most recent meal there, though, was breakfast, which has a different vibe – a steady stream of tradies getting takeaway and the rest of us focusing on that first mouthful of coffee. I had eggs and toast and a few of their gloriously unbreakfasty sides, which include olives, labneh, kale, sucuk and hummus."

ATMOSPHERE
"It's a real neighbourhood place – casual and super busy, but somehow there's always one table left, as if they knew you were coming. The cafe is at a bus-stop, so it's not quiet, but the noise just becomes part of the cheerful bustle.

"I've seen everyone I know in Balmain there at one time or another – groups of smartly dressed women, young couples with babies, men and women on their own with their iPads, locals in tracky-daks. From behind the coffee machine the owner greets everyone as if they're old friends. Table service is quick and efficient but warmly welcoming.

"These days I often have a problem in cafes and restaurants because of fragrance, which gives me a headache. Le Cafeier doesn't smell of cleaning products and they don't use things that artificially scent the air. If I need to avoid a strongly perfumed customer at the next table, I can shift to a table at the big front window, or one of the outside tables. Customers who move around can be a pain, but at Le Cafeier the staff are unfailingly obliging and helpful."

AT HOME
"Quick and simple is how I like to cook. In summer, a stir-fry with a heap of Asian greens plus fish or chicken, with plenty of ginger, garlic and lemon juice. In winter, lamb shanks or similar, thrown in the casserole with lots of sorrel and wine. The perfect recipe for me is anything with big taste, no fuss."

Kate Grenville's latest book, The Case Against Fragrance, is a non-fiction exploration of synthetic scents and their effects on our health. It is out this month, published by Penguin Australia.

LE CAFEIER

314/322 Darling Street, Balmain
8021 2910, lecafeier.com.au
Breakfast $10-$22, lunch $7-$19

​★★★½✰

REVIEW by Jenny Noyes

Sydney is sweating through a heatwave and the mercury is approaching 40 degrees when I arrive at Balmain local Le Cafeier for an early midweek lunch. This breezy little cafe on Balmain's bustling Darling Street strip isn't air-conditioned, but we're blessed with a seat at the big open window and are comfortable as can be.

Oscar Turkyucel and Arda Dinc opened Le Cafeier four years ago, initially serving standard "modern Australian" cafe food, but after a year or so they began to turn it towards their joint vision: authentic Turkish meals just like the food their mothers would make them at home as children, alongside good coffee and baked treats.

The cafe space is small and unassuming, giving little away in terms of Le Cafeier's Turkish roots. Small wooden tables line a whitewashed wall of hanging potted plants that bring a little of the outside in. Jars of house-made pickles line the shelves behind the counter, which is covered with sweet and savoury baked goods (shortbread, cakes, pastries, borek) – all made in-house.

But a glance at the menu lets you know that Le Cafeier's heart lies in the Middle East – although the food on offer is also a perfect match for Sydney's brunch scene: an ideal foil for the never-ending menus of granola, french toast and eggs-with-sides. Consider the falafel breakfast plate: rounds of crispy falafel lie beside a glistening pile of lemony kale and red cabbage, plus hummus, dukkah-dusted avocado and a boiled egg cooked to not-quite-hard perfection. The hummus is a little thin, but I'd take this over scrambled eggs, bacon and toast most days of the week, and my body would thank me for it too.

Today we're really here for the salads – and while there are plenty on the menu that are vegan and vegetarian-friendly, none of them could be described as rabbit food. Certainly not the lamb backstrap salad, which has a mound of shredded lamb piled high on a bed of freekeh "tabouli" (with a grain-to-greenery ratio much higher here than your regular tabouli).

Freekeh is a Levantian grain not unlike barley, but with a distinctly nutty flavour and al dente bite. Here it's cooked to perfection and dressed lightly with olive oil and lemon, parsley flecks and curls of marinated red onion. The lamb itself is standout, having been marinated and cooked for 12 hours – the meat is tender and the flavour deep and punchy. It is rather salty (which I confess I enjoy) but offset nicely with the freekeh and a yoghurt dressing.

The charcoal chicken, though perhaps not technically a salad, is nevertheless presented like one; chunks of juicy marinated chicken are warm but not hot, served on a wooden board over wilted salad greens and buttery sauteed celery that's been flavoured with fennel and coriander seeds. Again, it's salty but moreish, and balanced out with generous lashings of sour labneh. Roasted baby carrots are a fine addition, although a little lacking in flavour compared with the other elements – and I'd prefer them to be more blackened.

In heatwave weather, though, you surely can't go past a salad of watermelon and haloumi, bolstered with pesto-roasted tomato and baby spinach. The combination of sweet, tangy and salty goes down a treat, although for me it is overdressed and the greens would do better left a little more raw.

In all, we leave Le Cafeier relaxed, sated and smacking our lips. It feels effortless. Arda and Oscar have managed to create a friendly neighbourhood spot that not only showcases the flavours of the Middle East, but does so without pretense in a way that feels quintessentially Sydney.