Discard Your Assumptions Inside Adam Wolfers' New Menu at AALIA

There is a moment, in the courts of the Abbasid Caliphate, that most of the world has forgotten. Scribes were writing down recipes not as instruction, but as literature — dishes worth preserving for the pleasure of reading them, long before anyone worried about preserving them for the pleasure of eating them. Barberries. Black cardamom. Walnuts crushed into sauces thickened with bread. Ingredients that fell out of fashion, out of translation, out of memory.

At AALIA, they never left.

This is the world Executive Chef Adam Wolfers has spent his career circling — from the frantic pass at est. and Marque in the early 2000s, to a stage under Wylie Dufresne at WD-50 in New York, to the three-Michelin-starred kitchens of Quique Dacosta in Spain. He returned to Australia in 2013 with a sharper eye and an unshakable instinct for vegetables — an instinct that would later turn Yellow into one of the country's most acclaimed vegetarian restaurants. Somewhere in between, there was Ételek — a pop-up built on his own Hungarian-Jewish heritage, roaming the east coast in search of what "home cooking" really means when your home spans three continents.

Every kitchen Adam has stood in has asked the same question in a different accent: what have we forgotten, and is it worth remembering? At AALIA, the answer is emphatic.

Continuing the Pursuit

AALIA means "the highest point" in Arabic — not a boast, but a standard. It's the standard the kitchen has held itself to from the very beginning: poring over tenth-century Arabic cookbooks in search of ingredients and techniques the modern world had let slip — barberries, black cardamom, the slow logic of loubieh. Head Chef Emre Kilic has been there from day one, the thread of continuity as the kitchen now passes into new hands. Adam arrives not to start this pursuit, but to carry it further — honouring what came before, and building on it with everything those years at est., Marque, WD-50 and Quique Dacosta taught him.

The full new menu lands in August. But four dishes have already found their way to the table — an early current carrying the rest of the tide behind it.

Grilled hispi cabbage arrives first, charred hard enough to taste like the fire itself, draped in a tabil tahini — tabil being one of North Africa's oldest spice blends, coriander and caraway and garlic ground by hand in Tunisian kitchens long before it had a name written down — finished with almond dukkah for texture. Alongside it, celeriac reimagined as "crab": a vegetable transformed past assumption, paired with silverbeet loubieh, the same slow, deeply seasoned method found in kitchens from Beirut to Damascus usually built around green beans, brought together with a macadamia tarator whose roots run older than the countries that now claim it. And then Lebanese cucumber, dressed in a chatni gashneez — chatni being the much older root of the word chutney, gashneez simply coriander — scattered with walnuts and enough sharpness to wake the palate before it settles.

To Finish: Two Studies in Cold

Black cardamom ice cream, barberry chew, katafi, pistachio — a dessert built around an ingredient rarely given the spotlight. Black cardamom is smoked, resinous, almost savoury; barberries bring a tartness closer to sour cherry than raisin. Alongside it, a goat's milk sorbet with mandarin curd and toasted buckwheat — clean, slightly tangy, the citrus doing exactly what citrus has always done in this part of the world: cutting through richness with precision rather than sweetness.

What Comes Next

These four dishes are not a preview so much as a first sentence. The rest of the story — the full menu Adam and Head Chef Emre Kilic have been building since his arrival — launches in August, with the current menu serving its final table on August 1. What we can say now: this is a kitchen returning to first principles. Forgotten ingredients, exacting technique, and a refusal to call any of it "traditional" — because tradition implies something fixed, and what's happening at AALIA right now is very much alive.

Discard your assumptions. Pull up a chair. The rest is coming.

AALIA Restaurant, 25 Martin Place, Sydney CBD. For reservations and updates on the new menu, visit aaliarestaurant.com/reservations