Megaloprepís Meals Solved at Spero
John Caruso learns that the Coast’s most talked-about table may not be in a restaurant.
There’s a dining despair you may recognise. You’ve been at the beach since morning. The kids are sunburnt and sandy and somewhere past the point of reason. Your partner is eyeing the fridge with the optimism of someone who believes in magic. You want something that feels like an occasion without the occasion, something that tastes like effort without demanding any of yours.
Perhaps you have guests coming over for lunch and would rather spend the time catching up than washing up; or maybe you’ve just been at work all day and want the comfort and flavour of a slow-cooked, flavour-filled meal prepared with passion. Basically, you want a hearty meal. A proper one. And you want it now. Perhaps something that is truly megaloprepís (that’s Greek for magnificent, grand, or majestic).
For a long time, the answer to that problem was resignation. You’d order pizza or stand in front of the hot barbecue or drive somewhere and sit under bright lights in a noisy environment in a shirt you didn’t feel like wearing. None of it feeling right.
Spero, the much-loved Greek restaurant at Mooloolaba and part of the Tony Kelly Restaurant Group, has the solution! A lamb shoulder so carefully considered, so deliberately crafted, that it has become the restaurant’s defining dish. Imagine, sitting at a table at Mooloolaba Wharf with river breezes being served by the friendliest staff and feeling like you’re a guest in a greek ooma’s home. Or better still, ducking in and grabbing the full feast as a takeaway, packaged and prepared with the kind of fastidiousness you’d normally only find on a white tablecloth.
Harry Lilai, Executive Chef and co-owner, begins at the beginning.
“We start with a superb White Pyrenees lamb shoulder, coming out of the Grampians in Victoria,” he says. “It is Victorian lamb at its finest, a square-cut shoulder bought with the shank still attached, the blade bone still in.”
Here is where the magic comes in: the process takes two full days and the lamb is rubbed with a special mix of paprika, garlic, fresh herbs, lemon zest and olive oil. It goes into the oven overnight with a touch of lemon juice, some tomato, water and a generous pour of olive oil, lid on, the temperature set to 110 degrees for eight to ten hours.
“By morning, the bones come out by hand, pulling free without resistance from meat that has had all night to surrender,” Harry says. “It falls apart because it’s so tender.”
The shoulder is then reset, pressed back into shape and returned to the fridge overnight to firm up to deliver a product you can portion cleanly, a product that holds its integrity.
Then, on service, it goes back through a hot oven for twenty minutes to heat and create a divine crust over the top.
The rendered juices from the overnight cook are strained, defatted and reduced into a sauce.
It arrives at the table or packaged to go with tzatziki, pita bread, a village salad built the traditional way, with tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, olives and feta dressed with oregano and good olive oil; plus show-stopping roast potatoes that have been cooked in the lamb’s own juices with plenty of lemon and cooked uncovered to deliver a caramelised exterior while staying soft through the middle. Hook. Me. Up!
A full lamb shoulder feeds between five and eight people. That is a superb meal completely and properly sorted, without a single pot to wash.
Tony Kelly, head honcho of the Tony Kelly Restaurant Group, of which Spero is a part of, has been watching this dish perform in the restaurant for long enough to believe in what it can become.
“I’ve got this feeling that in ten years we’re going to be talking about how we decided to do this lamb thing, and it just blows up,” Tony says. He’s not given to overstatement, which makes the conviction worth noting.
What drove the takeaway push was a simple but persistent frustration, the gap between dining in and taking away. Every restaurant operator knows it.
A dish that sings on the plate in the restaurant too often arrives home in a different register, diminished by the drive, the container and the loss of that ambient heat. Tony has seen it happen with dishes he’s proud of, and he was determined it wouldn’t happen here.
“So many things on a takeaway menu are so delicious when you eat them in the restaurant, however you take them home and it’s not as good,” he says. “This lamb is one of those things that’s just as good at home as when you get it in the restaurant.”
Achieving that required the same discipline applied to the cooking itself. The packaging was engineered rather than assumed. The lamb sits inside a vessel designed to hold heat, which sits inside a second vessel. The system is not about presentation for its own sake. It is about protecting two days of work on a twenty-minute drive home.
“It demonstrates the effort we’ve put into making sure this product is going to be unbeatable,” Tony says.
You can pre-order and organise a pickup time in half-hour windows from lunch through to early evening.
The vision Harry and Tony share is of families, holidaymakers staying along the Mooloolaba Esplanade, and groups who have spent the day on the water, enjoying a hearty and heavenly feast without the fuss.
“You can sit, in your swimmers or PJs, around the deck and enjoy it, without ironing a shirt to go out,” Tony says.
The duo sees this becoming a weekly ritual for a significant slice of the Coast. A household staple with a restaurant soul.
“We can imagine people having this as a once-a-week go-to,” they enthuse.
That mealtime problem, the empty fridge, the tired family, the want of something that feels like someone cared, has a name now. It’s lamb shoulder. It’s Spero!
And the only thing you need do is call ahead – megaloprepís indeed!
