The Bearded Bakers and their pop-up bakery in an old shipping container will provide extra colour to this weekend’s street art festival in Caringbah.
Food trucks and live music will feature in the three-day Walk the Walls event, from Friday to Sunday, in which 34 visual artists will paint murals on 23 walls.
The Bearded Bakers and their mobile food container Knafeh, which regularly becomes a dance stage as well, are well known from events throughout Sydney, often attracting crowds to their “Jerusalem street food”.
Knafeh's creative director Ameer El-Issa said he was drawn to the Caringbah event through his interest in art.
“Knafeh is actually a marriage of two of my passions: design and architecture, as well as obviously a love for food,” he said.
“In fact, the paintings on the Knafeh container itself tell the story of its origins through the work of street artist Warrick McMiles.”
With the festival hoping to revitalise open spaces in Caringbah by painting walls to stop graffiti and vandalism, Ameer thinks is a perfect location for their container.
“In every sense, that’s what an evening at Knafeh is all about,” he said.
“We reinvent the locations we visit – this week it’s a Caribgbah car park, and It’s really about what we can make of the space we are in.”
In an earlier interview with Fairfax Media, Ameer, said they were “bringing all types of people together”.
“Our family is Palestinian Christian, but we have Muslims baking here with us,” he said.
"Knafeh is loved all over the Middle East. It is one of the region's symbolic desserts and the love for it transcends all races and religions and cultural backgrounds.
"We feel so blessed that because it is one of those rare projects that is so powerful and such a different experience it is bringing people together.
"We get hipsters foodies, designers, oldies and the later in the night it gets – the younger the clientele gets."
Knafeh is a Middle Eastern sweet cheese or cream dessert, topped with pistachios and drizzled with sugar syrup. It varies from region to region in the kinds of cheese or cream used. In Lebanon it is often eaten for breakfast sandwiched in a sesame seed bun.
The knafeh being served from the food truck is from a recipe from Ameer's mum, Nabila, whose family comes from Yaffa.
Ameer said it is a light mixture of cheese and cream and it is the sort of knafeh that people would eat in the streets of Jerusalem where his father was born.
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