Dispatches, Volume 1 by Chris Ying

Author:Chris Ying
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Artisan
Published: 2018-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Food Changes

Tony Tan as told to Rachel Khong

The first time I meet Tony Tan, it’s over a feast he’s cooked, course after course of thoughtful Chinese-meets-Australian food: gnocchi made from taro, served with his signature XO sauce; local oysters with a chili sauce, plated alongside a raw fish salad of King George whiting with lemongrass and thinly sliced kumquat; snappy mung bean noodles made sour with black vinegar and his homemade pickled ginger; Hakka-style salt-baked chicken with a bright green ginger-scallion sauce. He sautés a heap of vegetables and seasons them with kakadu plums, a local Australian variety that adds a fascinating acidity. There’s a crabmeat omelet that he cooks in a wok until the eggs are perfectly, barely set, and serves with a scattering of chilies he’s pickled himself but which remind me of the Malaysian chilies you find at hawker food stalls. They’re all familiar Chinese Malaysian flavors that surprise me with their thoughtfulness and freshness.

Over the next few days, Tony takes me to his favorite Melbourne restaurants: Flower Drum, the illustrious Chinese banquet restaurant that’s been part of Melbourne’s food scene for forty years, where the service is so good, the waiters draw little ducks out of the hoisin sauce that comes with your Peking duck; and Embla, a wine bar where a snapper carpaccio blows me away. At Flower Drum, he’s greeted with a glass of sparkling wine. At Embla, the chef sneaks him a loaf of his house-made bread. Tan is well known in Melbourne’s food circles for his passion and enthusiasm, and he is well loved.

What Tony and I have in common is that our Chinese families immigrated to Malaysia. From there, we left—to other places. From Kuantan, Malaysia, where his Hainanese family was in the café business, Tony moved to Australia, “ostensibly to finish university.” But there, during the “tail end of the hippie era,” his life took a very different turn.

The beginning of his Australian story is that he fell in with macrobiotic hippies at a vegetarian restaurant called Shakahari that still exists in Melbourne and serves food with a Southeast Asian twist. He was the only Chinese Malaysian working at the restaurant at the time and started by washing dishes on weekends. Then he was asked to make a dish, and he did: coconut cream pie, with a Malaysian twist. He started cooking regularly on Saturdays.

It was my first time here in Australia and there was nobody to guide me. It was nothing like Malaysia, where nothing was unusual to me. Upstairs at the former Shakahari was the meditation room. On Friday nights, there were all the devotees that would come upstairs and chant. It was an amazing experience. Who would have ever thought that there would be something like this in a restaurant? They were the ones who first got me into smoking dope. I didn’t even know what that was like—the Chinese culture is so very traditional. The first time I smoked dope, I was like, Oh my God!

I never knew that it was going to be like that.

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