This Greek restaurant’s fork-tender lamb chop will blow your mind

Previous SlideNext Slide

We’re in a Greek restaurant, so lamb is no surprise, but I’ve never had it quite like this. The menu says “chops”, so I wield a knife with intent, but a fork is sufficient to tear the meat apart. Every mouthful hits right: a sublime balance of char, salt, fat, lemon juice, a tickle of olive oil, a heady sprinkle of oregano. Food doesn’t get more honest. If there’s ever a hush in this lively room, with its polished concrete, brick and glossy, rendered plaster, it’s when people take their first bite of this luscious lamb and fall into a swoon.

Chef Nick Deligiannis is cooking the cuisine of his origins for the first time in a career that includes early training at fine-dining Jacques Reymond and being named The Age Good Food Guide’s Young Chef of the Year 2023 while he was at hatted Audrey’s in Sorrento. “The older I get, the more I appreciate family and want to explore my own culture,” he tells me.

Everything is cooked in a wood oven, except for a dessert doughnut, which is popped into a benchtop fryer. The restriction – fire and coals only – is a spur to creativity.

That lamb, for example, is based on a Cretan slow-braise called sfakiano. At Bar Sophia, thick, bone-in chops are placed by the dying coals to gently cook overnight in olive oil, onions, retsina, and lamb stock from the day before, a kind of meaty, Greek masterstock. The fire is stoked and coaxed for service, so the chops can be caramelised in fierce heat before serving.

Confident simplicity requires layered technique, which is also the case with the house cheese that’s made here every Wednesday (“haloumi day”), then sizzled to order and dressed with lemon, olive oil and oregano, a happy triumvirate that gets a lot of play. Whey from the cheese-making is used to make flatbread, which is topped with wild-garlic butter and cheese. Order it with bright, silky tarama.

If tomatoes are still on, have them and appreciate the sunshine. Grilled baby octopus is served over white-bean puree tinged with fish stock in a subtle tying together of sea flavours.

Bar Sophia, open since December, is a love letter to Greece by owners and hospitality lifers Marco Tenuta (Il Bacaro, Marameo) and Michael Badr (Marameo). Their city restaurants are Italian, but Greek is so hot right now. Also, Badr’s wife is Greek (her name is Sophia); they’re frequent travellers to the old country, and live locally, so had a hunch that this pumping precinct – home to Grazia, Central Park Cellars, Kerabu and Riserva – had space in its heart for a casual but polished restaurant where you can meet for prawns and peppers,
snapper and skewers, and learn to tell assyrtiko from malagousia (the first wine tends towards flinty, the latter is more elegant).

How right they were: the restaurant’s 60 or so seats are thrice turned over some nights, the chaos held in check – just – by an unflappable front-of-house team that makes dinner service a rolling party, and Bar Sophia one of Melbourne’s most compelling new restaurants.

More Glen Iris dining:

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.