Legend Award: Joseph Abboud

These days, we’re used to chefs training in fine dining, then melding their schooling with the food of their culture to create brave, soulful restaurants that teach us more about who we are – and who we might become. In the 2000s, not so much. Joseph Abboud had toiled at hatted Euro restaurants Est Est Est, Circa and Ondine before he plunged back into his Lebanese heritage to open Rumi in 2006.

Brunswick East was a different place. There was so little happening in a food sense that the easiest orienteering landmark was a nearby brothel. Share plates had to be explained to many diners. There was frequent anguish about the dark roasted cauliflower: surely the blackened tinge was in error? But Rumi quickly established itself among Melbourne’s great restaurants, and not only because Anthony Bourdain rhapsodised about the skewered quail in 2009.

The restaurant has moved twice: first just up the road, and in 2023 to East Brunswick Village, where sharp sibling bar Rocket Society became part of the happy picture.

Along the way, Abboud also brought us Bar Saracen, a city play that delivered mighty pleasure to its fans, and proudly inauthentic pizza joint The Moor’s Head.

But Rumi has been the constant – an industry training ground of distinction, and an exemplar of generous hospitality delivered in borderless Middle Eastern banqueting, perhaps marked by fragrant meatballs, tahini-slathered barramundi and just one more sip of arak.