The Family that Sweetened Sydney: How Elmowy & Sons Shaped Australia’s Taste for Lebanese Sweets

By Nadia Elkaid

Long before Lebanese sweets filled shopfronts across Australia, there was a busy Redfern corner shop where a family of new arrivals taught the nation to love baklawa (baklava). 

In December 1970, just six months after arriving in Sydney, pastry chef Rateb Elmowy and his son Abdullah (known as Albert) opened Elmowy & Sons, the first Lebanese sweet shop in Australia.

<Inside Elmowy & Sons. Pictured from left to right: Fawaz, Abdullah (Albert), Rateb (Ahmad's son), Ahmad (Alan) and Rateb. Supplied.

Inside, trays once gleamed with baklawa filled with cashews and pine nuts, ma’amoul dusted in sugar, and halawat al jibn, a sweet cheese made from melted mozzarella, semolina, sugar and rosewater.  

“We were flat out within a few months” recalls Gassan Elmowy, one of Rateb’s sons, who grew up inside the shop on the corner of Cooper and Walker streets. 

“When we first opened, we were working practically 20 hours a day”, said Gassan. “The shop would close about midnight, but during public holidays, Christmas or New Year, it would be open until two or three in the morning.”

Rateb migrated to Australia with his eight children, building a family run business where everyone played a part. Some cooked and wrapped sweets, while others served customers or built the boxes used to pack sweets. Trained in Tripoli by his uncle, Rateb brought with him generations of skill.  

“We had two rooms to operate in, one with the ovens and the other with the ashta (milk curd) and the table where we made the filo pastry. Every evening after cooking and cleaning, the four of us [brothers] would sit inside that small back room smashing and mixing cashews, walnuts and dates, with a machine we turned by hand. We were doing roughly 20 or 30 kilos of nuts a night.”

The demand never slowed. “We used to order a tonne of flour and a tonne of sugar every couple of weeks,” Gassan says. “You’d put a tray of sweets outside, and it only lasted ten or fifteen minutes”. 

But the Elmowy’s reach went far beyond Redfern and supplied restaurants and grocers across Sydney. Their baklawa and ma’amoul were shipped around the country, packed in boxes and sent by train. 

“Every week we’d send ten kilos of cakes to restaurants in Surfers Paradise and Brisbane,” Gassan says. “We had customers from Melbourne, Adelaide, all over”. 

Elmowy & Sons supplied about forty shops across the country and was profiled twice in the Sydney Morning Herald as “a quiet little corner of Lebanon in Redfern”.

The 2000 Sydney Morning Herald article by Helen Greenwood featuring Elmowy & Sons. Supplied.

“We were approached by newspapers, journalists, even pastry chefs," says Nada Elmowy, Rateb’s eldest daughter. “People wanted to write about us and the interest never faded. We were approached about seven years ago to film a documentary on our family,” she says.

For many, Elmowy & Sons was as much a meeting place as a business. “It really meant a lot for a lot of people," Gassan says. “People used to come in not only for the sweets but to sit down with my dad, to talk, to have a bit of a conversation with him, they loved the atmosphere.”

The eldest, Ahmad (known as Alan) became known for singing as he served customers, offering them samples of sweets, a touch that filled the shop with warmth. 

“We really catered for everyone; Lebanese, Australians, all nationalities,” says Nada. “People travelled from far away because it wasn't just the only sweet shop at the time, it was the nicest. You ask anyone who is Lebanese and they’d know the name Elmowy.”

She says the family’s insistence on freshness and quality set them apart. “That was their trademark, their products were always fresh. Even when other stores opened later, people still bought from us because my father’s sweets were the nicest in Australia.” 

The shop never expanded beyond Redfern, by choice. “It was the only shop we opened, because my father was content and wanted to keep it within the family,” Nada says. “And for that one shop, it made a big blast.”

For 36 years, the family ran the business without a pause, seven days a week. Over the years, customers came to see the shop as a landmark. When it closed in 2006, the calls didn't stop. 

“For more than ten years people kept asking if we’d opened somewhere else, or when we were going to reopen,” Gassan says. “Even now, they still ask if I can make sweets for them at home.” 

One admirer later wrote that “no Lebanese patisserie in Sydney today compares to the quality of Elmowy. Its sweets were the stuff of Phoenician legends.”

Though the shop has long closed, its legacy lingers, in the aroma of rosewater that still drifts from Sydney’s many patisseries, and in the story of a family whose hard work and hospitality helped shape Australia’s multicultural palate. 

It lives on in the memories of those who knew the Elmowy family, and through the family itself, now spanning four generations.

Rateb Elmowy's daughter teaches her niece how to make baklawa. Photograph: Nadia Elkaid.

“People still recognise us,” says Nada. “It’s not only the seventies generation, even their kids. They’ll stop us and say, "My dad used to talk about your dad and the sweet shop.”