There’s nothing like seeing a batch of freshly cooked puri coming straight out of the kitchen. Puffed up like UFOs, these hollow and soft deep fried breads have slightly crisp edges and a speckled golden brown surface. They cook them all morning long on weekends at AD’s Kitchen, one of the few places offering a traditional Nepali breakfast in Sydney.
AD’s Kitchen started as a home-run catering service by Anjana Dhakal (AD) before blooming into a restaurant business. Swing by during weekends for their buffet breakfast, hugely popular with ex-pats seeking a sentimental taste of home.
Pay $12 at the register and you’ll be provided with a plastic plate to load up as often as you like at the self-serve buffet. That means limitless puri breads, aloo matar – a mild potato and pea curry – and kala chana, a dry curry of black gram beans that you can bling up with raw red onion and tiny green chillies that pack some serious heat. On the sweet side, dig into kheer sweet rice pudding and bright orange swirls of syrup-soaked deep-fried dough called jeri, the Nepali version of Indian jelebi. A massive urn of strong and sweet chai tea will have you buzzing in no time.
Go from savoury to sweet or meander back and forth between both. It’s not uncommon to sandwich the stickily sweet jeri inside a puri and eat them together, like a Nepalese version of a desert taco.
Start with small serves of everything so you can figure out what you’d like for seconds. And thirds. Just make sure you follow the rules on the wall: “Take all you can eat. Eat all you take”.
Avoid the queues by arriving before 10am or after 1pm – the breakfast buffet finishes at 2pm. Still hungry? They also run a dinner buffet for $25 a head that includes unlimited momo dumplings.