On a usual night, Haldon Street in the south-west Sydney suburb of Lakemba is quiet and dark. But these are not usual days. It’s Ramazan and this street is at the heart of it.

The Lakemba Ramazan Food Festival that begins on the first of Ramazan and has been running for over 10 years is the hotspot for food lovers, especially those with a taste for the Middle-Eastern and Arab cuisine.

As darkness falls, it’s intriguing how this very typical looking street morphs into a vivacious trail marked with lively colours, hustle and bustle, diverse populations and the delicious Middle-Eastern food, the exotically warm aroma of which travels to both ends of the street.

Readymade pie crusts after being filled with cheese, chicken or beef filling

There are three entries to the street with the main one through a wide corridor connecting the market parking lot and the centre of the street. The instance you start overhearing people speaking in Arabic, English, Urdu and even Pashto, you know you’ve just entered the Lakemba Ramazan Food Market.

The instance you start overhearing people speaking in Arabic, English, Urdu and even Pashto, you know you’ve just entered the Lakemba Ramazan Food Market

Unlike the rest of Australia, this market knows no sleep and neither do its visitors. At least not until 4am. I made it to the market after a 60-minute drive from where I live. My excitement was increasing with every kilometre I covered and I had my reasons for it.

As a quintessential Lahori, by now I’ve gotten quite disappointed by the routine market timings in Australia, where everything closes at 5:30pm. So, to make me feel at home my Pakistani friend, who has been living in the area for over four years, suggested that I arrive late night. Hesitantly, I did, only to see that the market had just started warming up.

Zaatar manoushe

The stalls at the festival are lined up outside the shops — reminiscent of the Gowalmandi Food Street in Lahore. At any given time, there’s an overlapping aroma of the famous Lebanese-style roasted corn-on-the-cob; the rich and saucy camel burgers being barbecued live; and the strong smell of melting cheese inside the several types of cheese pies, including sambousek and fatayer jibneh, cooking over large-sized convex griddles (tawas).

What, however, saw that most customers queue up were stalls selling zaatar manoushe that has been the pride of Beirut’s most extravagant dining tables for thousands of years. Zaatar manoushe is a round cheese pie with zaatar, a type of herb, sprinkled all over the pie, usually with a combination of sesame seeds.

Yasin Khobi, 34, probably makes the best manoushe at Haldon Street. As I waited, probably as the 13th or the 14th person in the queue, his hands moved with a brilliant robotic pattern as he tossed and turned and finally cut the pie in four before being served steaming hot.

But it was not the manoushe I was specifically looking to eat. I’ve been craving a camel burger since I had heard that they existed. The street did not have a shortage of camel burger stalls, so I randomly selected one with the most people in queue, again — a typically Pakistani way to assess a place’s quality and taste.

The cook introduced himself as Mahir Madani. He claimed to have sold over 900kg of camel meat since Ramazan had begun. I agreed with his claim with the very first bite. Madani said most people running camel burger stalls were planning to donate the proceeds from the sales as charity for the needy in Syria. That is when I ordered my second burger and my husband his third.

Corn on the cob to beat the cold

With so much meat consumed in one go, my eyes started searching for something to drink — something different than a regular soft drink. And who could miss these small kiosks with big white plastic drums filled with carrot juice? Only that this was orange and people seemed to be in love with it.

However, a sip later, and that is all I had, I realised what locals have been missing out on all their lives. The diluted red carrot juice back in Pakistan could beat the taste of these orange Chinese carrots any day. But the carrot juice sellers in Lakemba were indeed busy, blending a carrot one after another through the night to meet the demand.

But the fact that the latter could produce so much juice was in fact a revelation for me.

What’s Ramazan without sweets?

As I walked down the street, the spicy aroma started to transmute into a sweet smell. There was definitely something to look out for, and I was right.

My sense of smell took me straight to Nabil Omar’s shop, where he was preparing halawet el jeban, literally meaning the sweetness of cheese — ‘a sweet to kill for in Tripoli’, someone later told me.

Camel pattie

In Lebanon, the halawet el jeban is to Ramazan like the pakoras are to Ramazan in Pakistan.

As I took a bit of this heavenly sweet, followed by a sip of hot steaming Turkish coffee, Omar told me he had been making the halawet el jeban for over 30 years.

“This is all I have known,” he said as he and his granddaughter, one of the 13 he had, helped him carefully place the sheets on the table.

“The sweet is a combination of sweet cheese, sugar, milk and semolina (suji),” he said. According to Omar, there are several ways to prepare the sweet, but the right and the traditional way is to prepare thin sheets of the sweet dough, roll them and garnish with pistachios and honey.

His target is to sell 300kg by the end of the month. By the taste of the sweet, I believe, selling this much shouldn’t be a problem.

“Is it safe?”

Muslims have been in Australia for more than 200 years and Haldon Street is a major attraction for the over half-a-million Muslims in Australia. While all of them can certainly not make it to the Ramazan Festival every year, there isn’t a paucity of those who said they had travelled long distances to just spend a night at the street.

Ayesha Qurban was one of them. Born and bred in Pakistan and having just recently moved to Australia for higher education, she was visiting the area with some friends.

Currently living in Brisbane, it was not a coincidence that she was in Lakemba’s Ramazan Food Market. The trip was deliberately planned.

“We had to come to Sydney for some research work, so we planned the trip to overlap with Ramazan.”

Qurban’s non-Muslim friends were, however, a little hesitant. Stephane Lee, who was accompanying her, had specifically asked if it was safe for locals to visit the place. One of her reasons of insecurity was that Lakemba was a ‘Muslim dominated area’. Now Lee seemed to be having most fun among the group.

Lee shares her apprehensions with hundreds of other non-Muslim residents. I felt some of their concerns were legitimate, including the illegal parking causing problems for residents.

In just one week last year, the Canterbury Council had received 26 complaints against noise pollution, illegal parking and unauthorised stalls. This year, the Council invited 10 business owners to form a working group to regulate the market.

There had been no complaint till present, a proof that the market was being regulated lawfully.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 27th, 2014