Don't miss the bouillabaisse bolognese at Baba's Place

Anyone who lived within five kilometres of Baba's Place during Sydney's last lockdown was lucky. Takeaway cherry kofta, samk et harra ("Lebo-filet-o-fish") with toum-salt fries, and a sour cherry soda lifted spirits and brought novelty to the repetitive days.

But even though their takeaway game was the talk of the area, owners Alex Kelly and Jean Paul El Tom had a bigger vision for their eatery when the roller doors were thrown open for dine-in.

"We didn't take over this big f---ing warehouse just to sling takeaway," Kelly says. Between the vast space, the owners' fearless experimentation and local diners' hunger for something new, Baba's Place is living up to its potential.

It might be easy to define the menu as a modern take on Middle Eastern or eastern European food; El Tom and Kelly are respectively of Lebanese and Macedonian descent. But that would be missing the point. Baba's Place is an ode to their childhoods growing up as the kids of migrants in Western Sydney.

The food reflects the unity children of migrants often find with one another, not because they have heritage in common, but because they have otherness in common. In pulling inspiration from the diversity of Western Sydney, Baba's Place celebrates cuisine and culture in a way that refuses to be limited by country borders, language, or ethnicity.

"National cuisines don't exist," says Kelly. "I think if you try to compartmentalise food in terms of a binary, you'll struggle."

Adds El Tom: "It's hard to say a cuisine is from one place or another. A lot of what we have in Australia is just what made it in suitcases when people immigrated."

A good example is the bouillabaisse bolognese, which evolved from a dish that's part of every Australian's childhood. "It doesn't matter if you're Italian, spag bol is such a part of people's eating existence," says Kelly.

El Tom's take on the ubiquitous dish resembles zha jiang mian (Beijing fried sauce noodles). "I love prawn and bacon, so I make a kind of XO sauce with fresh prawns, bacon and fermented chilli and blend it into a paste. That forms the base of the sauce. Then it's mixed with lamb ragu and prawn head stock and served over fresh noodles with cucumber and smoked koji-infused oil."

The Baba's Place menu inspires a bring-me-one-of-everything attitude, which is a good strategy for a group. That way you can try the trio of whole fried fish with taratour (tahini with lemon juice and garlic), shatta (green chilli sauce) and fried Afghan bread, as well as the sweet scallops finished with koji butter, and the toum salted chips served with baby cos and lefet (red pickled turnips).

The salted plum cocktail with rakija might be divisive, but anyone fond of huamei – sweet-sour-salty dried Chinese plums – will enjoy the drink. On the night I visited, anyone in my group uncertain about the flavour combination had their cocktails whisked away and generously replaced by the affable Kelly. The dining room was pumping, but the service was impeccable.

Everything at Baba's Place seems to come back to the theme of identity, from the decor – baba-style clear vinyl covered sofas, doily decorated tables and lace curtains in the windows – to the labne, which is so deliciously alive, it's on the edge of fizzy, and is also migrant of sorts.

"It's made with an old culture that comes from my village in Lebanon. My grandma smuggled it here ages ago," El Tom says.

The conversation turns to how old the yoghurt culture might be, with Kelly suggesting it could have hundreds of years of history.

"It's old in the sense that we're old because we have ancestors. We're an old collection of DNA," El Tom says.

Given the history of the yoghurt culture, it will likely stay on the menu in some form or another. But with knockout dishes such as the Lebo-filet-o-fish and cherry kofta gone, will the bouillabaisse bolognese go one day as well?

"Nothing is sacred," says El Tom.

The lowdown

Main attraction: A menu that experiments fearlessly, celebrating Australia's waves of migration.

Go-to dish: Bouillabaisse bolognese with handmade noodles.

Drinks: A succinct list featuring wine from Lebanon, eastern Europe and Australia, tasty rakija-based sodas plus the usual cocktail suspects.

Rating: Four stars (out of five).