Rockdale’s Beloved Burek Shop Is Bigger Than Ever, Now With Room for Macedonian Doughnuts
At around 4.15am every day, Jovan and Nikola Radevski arrive at The Burek Brothers and start making burek. Each batch of dough requires two hours of kneading, oiling and resting. By around 6am, the first trays of the pastry – hand-stretched and filled – are going into the oven.
“No one younger is making burek, everyone doing it is sort of a dying generation.”
“Generally three dough balls go into one burek,” Jovan says. “A typical week, you're looking at anywhere between 2500 and 3500 dough balls.”
Their father Risto Radevski ran Pella Burek in Rockdale from 2003 to 2011. Jovan was 14 when he first started making burek there, while Nikola was nine and helped prep everything else. Years later – after a stint living in Macedonia, and studying commerce and aeronautical engineering respectively – the brothers returned to Rockdale and opened The Burek Brothers. For Jovan, it was unfinished business.
“We just had to do it again,” he says. “No one younger is making burek, everyone doing it is sort of a dying generation.”
The brothers wanted to bring Macedonian food to a wider Sydney audience, without losing the techniques their father had taught them. And it’s safe to say Sydney was into it.
Their bureks arrive hot and deeply golden, the hand-stretched pastry forming thin, crisp layers. When it first opened, The Burek Brothers menu had just three savoury flavours: cheese, spinach and cheese, and beef (which quickly became the bestseller). They now run more than 20 varieties – the meat and potato, closer to a maznik, is my favourite, especially dipped into the brothers’ ajvar – with daily specials and vegan options alongside the traditional fillings.
But now the team is going bigger, expanding into the space next door. That means a larger kitchen, around 60 seats across a new dining room and outdoor area, and more menu items from their childhood.
Inspired by a traditional Macedonian house, the new dining room has timber beams across the ceiling, rendered walls and Macedonian music playing. Where the original shop was primarily a takeaway spot with only a handful of seats, the new space gives customers room to settle in.
They continue to use meat from the nearby Butcher Boys and locally made cheese from Vannella, and source vegetables from Flemington. The fillings are mixed and prepared in-house, then stuffed into the hand-stretched dough. The technique was passed down from their great-grandfather to their father, then to Jovan and Nikola.
For months during childhood, their father had Jovan practice with a wet tea towel, stretching and throwing it repeatedly until he could form a circle without it folding over itself. Once he could nail it 15 times in a row, he was finally allowed to touch the dough.
You’ll also find a house-made maštejnca, the tart, lightly salty fermented yoghurt drink made to the same recipe their mum would make litres of weekly. Now, she’s in the shop on weekends, making her mekici. The Macedonian doughnuts are sweet and pillowy, landing between a fluffy doughnut and flatbread. Go early, they sell out before 11am.
For Jovan and Nikola, the goal has always been to share the magic of burek. They hold childhood memories of waking up to the smell of burek being made at home. It was the ultimate breakfast, “better than cereal, better than eggs and bacon,” Jovan says. Eight years after first opening The Burek Brothers, the brothers have room for everyone else to sit down and share it.
