As Thai and American-style offerings dominate Wollongong’s dining scene, an Iraqi-born restaurateur is taking the city in an exotic new culinary direction.
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Casablanca opened on lower Crown Street last week, becoming the city’s lone Moroccan restaurant.
Past hand-painted sidewalk tables and coloured glass lanterns, Chef Omar Osaj mixes the traditional North African cuisine with flavours from his native Middle East.
Central to the menu are Moroccan tagines – slow-cooked meats nestled amongst aromatic prunes, orange blossom, chamoula and the bittersweet preserved lemon that is Morocco’s food mainstay.
Cooked and served in the iconic cone-shaped clay dishes of the same name - perhaps with a pot of steaming sweet mint tea - the scene is deliberately different.
“We have many burger places in Wollongong, we have Lebanese and Turkish,” Mr Osaj, 28, told the Mercury.
“But we don’t have Moroccan. I’ve been in Australia for five years and I really do appreciate Australia.
“I wanted to do something [in return] for the people of Wollongong.”
Mr Osaj was an electrician in Iraq before he fled the war there and - after a four-month stay at Villawood –settled in Wollongong.
As a boy, his Iraqi-born mother cooked tagines and made Moroccan sweets using recipes picked up during her four years spent teaching French in Morocco.
Mr Osaj, a former Samara’s apprentice and head chef at short-lived Harbour Street favourite Chargoal, brought noted Moroccan chef Hassan M'Souli (Out of Africa, Manly) to Wollongong for in-house training before Casablanca’s opening.
He sees many similarities between the Middle East’s casserole-style cuisine - with its tumeric, smoked paprika and reliance on fresh herbs – and Moroccan food.
“I think the method is similar, but the way we present it is different, and the way of engaging the flavours and the spices is a bit different,” he said.
Almost certainly unique to Casablanca is its camel meat balls tagine, served with tomata shamula.
The attention-grabbing dish has produced only happy customers so far, Mr Osaj said.
“People go, ‘urgh, camel’. I say, ‘if you don’t like it, I’ll pay for it’.”
Moroccan food remains uncommon in Australia, a circumstance Mr Osaj attributes to the lack of a local immigrant population and the unique demands involved in cooking the food en masse.
“It’s not easy. If you have 50 customers, and 20 of them want tagines [at once] – which kitchen can handle 20 flames?”
The restaurant comes in a year of great growth for Wollongong’s dining scene.
Its opening has been welcomed by Destination Wollongong.
“Anything that comes in and is new and expands the city’s menu is extremely valuable,” said marketing manager Tabitha Galvin.
“We love to see the dining scene expanding and evolving, because it means we’re able to deliver more to visitors and enhance their experience of the city.”
