ABLA’S, VIC
Abla Amad & family
It can be hard to keep track of the warm Amad clan, with its countless children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, but one thing is clear: Abla Amad is the sun around which the family revolves. The 85-year-old is the picture of the elegant matriarch as she holds court from her favourite table, but few octogenarians can claim to work every night in the restaurant they opened 41 years ago.
“My house used to be like a restaurant, all the cousins coming over on a Saturday,” says Amad, who arrived in Australia from Lebanon aged 19. “My husband, John, said to me, if you want to open a restaurant, I will help you.”
A unique strand of Melbourne restaurant history began in 1979 with the opening of Abla’s on Elgin
Street. A true family affair, it has seen her five children, 13 grandchildren and “the extended Amads” working in the kitchen and on the floor.
It’s a shifting population. Currently, the restaurant’s core family group comprises daughter Margaret-Anne, daughter-in-law Rae and niece Jeannette Douaihy heading the team affectionately described by Amad as her “ladies” in the kitchen, making kibbeh, stuffed silverbeet leaves, and the classic chicken and rice. The esteem in which the boss lady is universally held is palpable. “She’s not my boss; she’s my mother,” says Douaihy. And Rae says, “You have words, then it’s all over in two seconds. Amad never lets anything get to her. At the end of the night, you sit down and have coffee together.”
Another positive with such a big clan? Finding staff is never a problem. “It’s word of mouth,” says Amad. “It’s such a big family… you know someone who wants a job.”
The legacy of Ablas’s stretches beyond these pale-grey walls decorated with gilt-framed oil paintings of the old country. Amad’s niece, Linda Malcolm, founder of the Alimentari café-delis in Fitzroy and Collingwood, started as a dishwasher at 13, before waiting tables through her teenage years. She credits her aunt with lighting the hospitality fire through her own time in the Amad family-job time-share. “It wasn’t so long ago all the nieces and nephews were sitting around and we realised we’d all been through the restaurant in some way,” says Malcolm. “She was the first person in the industry I really looked up to. Every night without fail she’d take her apron off, brush her hair, put lipstick on and go out to greet each table. It was never about making money for her; it was a source of pride.”
Amad is thoroughly deserving of her accolades. She was a guest on MasterChef in 2011, alerting a new generation of diners to the joys of classic Lebanese cooking. She received a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2015 for her service to the industry. But it’s her family and her restaurant, two indivisible entities, of which she’s proudest.
“We have a lovely life and a good family,” she says.
“I go to sleep at night never once regretting that I did this.”
Abla’s, 109 Elgin St, Carlton, Vic, (03) 9347 0006, ablas.com.au