Photography: Joshua Pike
We’re somewhere around the three-quarter mark of our meal at Caness, a rowdy, pan-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern bar/restaurant on Sydney’s Oxford Street, when I realise things have started to get saucy. Literally. There are puddles of yoghurt and harissa oil pooling around the lamb kebab. Bias-cut chorizo bobbing on a lake of red wine beef jus. And a grassy herb and caper salsa lapping insistently against the last smoky tentacles of fire-roasted octopus. “I think,” announces my friend, “we’re going to need some bread.”
I’d flicked past the bread on the menu when ordering, mostly because the earlier snacks we chose all seemed to be perched on various forms of starch – pulled lamb on rounds of mini brioche, and a tumble of sabich, a Middle Eastern salad of boiled eggs, vegetables and tahini, atop a circlet of za’ata-flecked pita. More bread felt like overkill, or so we thought. Turns out, we were lucky everything became so sauced up, because otherwise we mightn’t have ordered Caness’ excellent kubaneh bread.
Kubaneh is a Yemenite bread roll, and this version arrives as a fat scroll, like a cinnamon bun without the sugar glaze. Pulling it apart, the centre is soft and pillowy and scattered with nigella seeds deep within its fluffy folds. “Polka dot bread,” we decide, as we swipe its soft centre through the table’s various sauces, as well as the duo of crushed tomato and schug dips it came with. It’s rich and warm and a little sweet, providing the kind of generous comfort that only freshly baked bread can. I discover later it’s the menu’s bestseller, and I can’t think of many better ways to tame all that sauce.
Beyond the bread, Caness – a sister venue to popular Surry Hills Middle Eastern restaurant, Shaffa – serves comfort on many fronts. A fiery parilla grill takes centre stage in the open kitchen, hung with bunches of herbs, giving the sense that we’re gathered around a home hearth. The by-the-glass wine list, scrawled on a blackboard, is packed with personality and fairly priced drops to encourage “just one more”. And the food feels like it’s sailed across the entire Mediterranean; one minute you’re eating Greek prawn saganaki, the next you have mussels bathed in Middle Eastern arak. All of it is generous and nostalgic.
The only area where the cosiness slips is the raucous noise levels; while they add to the conviviality of it all, more padding on the hard surfaces wouldn’t go amiss. For now, order another round of that bread. It’ll bring a happy calm to anything.
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