There’s nothing quite like Enmore Road during the Sydney Comedy Festival. Laughter echoing on every corner, restaurants and bars full to the brim with joyful diners, Uncle Ay-Jay’s cooking up a storm outside of Jacoby’s Tiki Bar, the smell of their chimichurri octopus skewers stopping pedestrians in their tracks.
If you love woodfire cooking but Uncle Ay-Jay’s is not outside Jacoby’s Tiki Bar that day, all you have to do is cross the road to Firepop, a sleek Japanese-looking restaurant that hides many surprises.
As you enter, the long open kitchen welcomes you with the smell of vegetable skin roasting and meat juices dripping on open fire.
If you love a dinner and a show, sit at the bar and get lost in the dancing flames and ballet-like moves of the chefs but if you like surprises, ask to be sat upstairs. Like visiting someone’s house, you’ll go through their lounge at the back of the restaurant before going up the stairs to what feels like an entirely different venue altogether with its own bar, staff and decor. Here it feels like you’re in someone’s dining room, much like Kindred in Chippendale, which is visibly a house turned into a restaurant, but that’s a review for another day.
The menu is eclectic yet simple, heavily focused on meat of course (this is a woodfire restaurant after all) but with a healthy dose of options for pescetarians, vegetarians and vegans (this is Enmore after all).
Their Wagyu slices took me straight back to Japan and its street vendors selling skewers of wagyu so soft you don’t even need teeth.
The absolute star of the show, however, was their stracciatella. Now I know stracciatella covered with seasonal fruit and olive oil is not groundbreaking, it is the new burrata and I’ve eaten at least seven different variations in Sydney alone (special mention to the ones at Cafe Paci and Ragazzi). This one was by far the best I have ever tasted. I don’t know if it was the lime, the red onions or the Koroneiki olive oil but it was like I was tasting this dish for the very first time.
You can, however, skip the zucchini “accordion” steak. We ordered it precisely because we never understood why zucchini is so under-represented in restaurants. Now we do. There’s only so much zucchini you can have, especially when it’s cooked over fire and the inside remains quite mushy. I love creative thinking when it comes to vegetables, I really do, but maybe some vegetables are not destined for the woodfire grill.
