Chef Paul Farag Once Avoided Middle Eastern Food. Now He Embraces It.

When Chef Paul Farag decided to quit school at 15 years-old and pursue a career in the kitchen, his Egyptian parents didn’t react well to the news. He was the only one in a family that had emigrated from Egypt to Australia in the 80s to actually be born in this new land; to them, he was the Australian of the family, yet like many Egyptian parents they wanted him to become an engineer or a doctor.

“I did everything in my power to never cook Middle Eastern food,” the Australian-Egyptian Chef tells SceneEats at the kitchen of Sachi in Park St., where he was preparing for a takeover dinner powered by Baky Hospitality for Cairo Food Week 2026. “I was sort of in this limbo land, because within the Australian landscape I wasn’t really considered Australian either.”

To say the least, not wanting to cook Middle Eastern food in Australia wasn’t exactly a problem that held back a young Chef Farag. Talented, he immediately landed apprenticeships in restaurants and gained the skills he thought made him ready to become a Chef. With that confidence, he decided to leave Australia altogether and move to London.

“I moved to London when I was 21 years old,” he says. “I thought I was ready-chefy, and the moment I went to London I realized I was so out of my depth. But that was the reason I went to London: to get my ass kicked.”
After two years there, and a not-so-successful venture in the form of French Brassirie with another Australian cook he met in London who had grown up only minutes away from him in Sydney, he decided to return home to his previous place of employment.

“I became Head Chef at 23 years old, and it really snowballed from there.” This was 2014. By 2020, when he was appointed Executive Chef at a Lebanese and Middle Eastern restaurant in Surry Hills named NOUR, something had changed inside Farag.

“It was something of a lightbulb moment for me to discover one of the oldest cultures in the world, and cuisines, and to start representing that landscape in Sydney,” he says. “I think sometimes in life you have moments that make you go, wait a second, I should be proud of my heritage and really lean into it. A beautiful moment for me to be able to delve into my heritage and start cooking the cuisine.”

In 2022, as the Executive Chef at ESCA, Chef Farag fully realized his vision with the opening of his flagship restaurant, AALIA. This was a fine-dining space dedicated to showcasing the depth of Middle Eastern and North African cuisine, and Chef Farag’s renewed appetite for his Egyptian heritage was at the heart of it.
“I had my father’s recipe for Moussaka in the middle of the CBD in Sydney. You would never even expect a white person to be able to pronounce Mossaka.”

Now, Chef Farag’s reclamation of his heritage—culinary and otherwise—reaches new heights at Cairo Food Week 2026. Alongside Baky Hospitality’s Executive Chef Ali Ghadban, they’ve been preparing for months to create a night which celebrates all the family recipes, memories and rituals carried across generations.
“This has been an extremely emotional thing for me, to come to Egypt and cook in my parent’s homeland,” Chef Farag reflects on the journey.

“My father is no longer with us. It would be amazing for him to know that I’ve come back to his homeland where he grew up for most of his life and now I’m cooking on one of the best stages that Cairo has to offer. It’s something that I can’t put into words.”