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Kylie Knott

In 2017 Lin Jie Kong, at the tail end of a road trip, stopped for food in the tiny Australian town of Karuah, New South Wales.
She was expecting the usual pub fare – fish and chips or chicken Parmesan.
Instead, she found a restaurant serving Australian-Chinese favourites such as sweet and sour pork, Mongolian lamb and a tasty selection of Sichuan classics.
Kong ordered the special fried rice – it was blanketed in barbecue pork, chicken and prawns – and the sweet-sauce-smothered Peking pork, which was crisp and juicy.

“In this tiny town – the population was probably about 1,000 – I had one of the best Chinese meals of my life,” Kong says via a Zoom call from Sydney.
After the meal, Kong rang her “creative confidante”, comedian Jennifer Wong. Their resulting conversation sowed the seeds of Chopsticks or Fork?, a six-part television series exploring Chinese restaurants in small towns around Australia.
Between 2020 and 2022, in what many would consider a dream assignment, the pair traversed the country, eating food at restaurants and chatting with the families who owned and operated them.












View this post on Instagram























A post shared by Jennifer Wong (@jenniferwongcomedian)



This month, Chopsticks or Fork?, a book based on the TV series, was released, featuring 32 mouthwatering recipes. And the human stories behind them are truly heartwarming.
Several of the 10 restaurants the authors visited have ties to Hong Kong.
At T’s, in the sleepy Tasmanian town of Sheffield, Hong Kong-born Alex Zhao runs the country’s only paddock-to-plate Chinese restaurant, for which most of the ingredients are sourced from its own farm.


Diners flock there for the hand-pulled noodles with cumin-spiced lamb, and pan-fried potstickers.
Raymond Ng, owner of Raymond’s at Malua Bay, in New South Wales, worked as a tailor in Hong Kong before moving Down Under.
“When I arrived in Australia, I had to learn another trade because Australians don’t really wear suits,” Ng says in the book.


Today, diners love Ng’s honey prawns and the Peking duck served with his home-made hoisin sauce.
Another chapter is dedicated to Leon Toy who, until recently, operated Toy’s Garden Restaurant, in Victoria, which had its own version of the Great Wall, and mini golf course.
Toy ran the restaurant for almost 50 years with his wife, May Har, who claims she has churned out a million spring rolls since arriving in Australia from Hong Kong in 1976.
Toy also came from Hong Kong, alone in 1962 – aged just 12 – to join his father, who had been there since 1949.

The country’s White Australia policy, which limited non-British migration to Australia, had prevented him from arriving earlier.
One restaurant that Wong has a particularly close connection to is Happy’s, in Canberra; she ate there while studying at university more than 20 years ago.
“It was a delight to go back and speak to Gavin Chan,” she says, of the third-generation owner of the family restaurant that opened in 1962.


The book also features a section on chopstick etiquette, and another containing everyday Australians’ poignant memories of Chinese restaurants, some dating as far back as the 1940s.
Nostalgic items often spotted in Chinese restaurants in regional Australia – serviettes in wine glasses, rose-shaped carrot garnishes, lucky Maneki-neko cats, bamboo plants and goldfish bowls – are also celebrated.
And while Australian-Chinese cuisine differs from authentic Chinese food – made sweeter to cater to Western palates – a chapter titled “the lost cousins of Australian Chinese dishes” shows how much of it has been shaped by Cantonese food.
In the early 90s, most Chinese food in Australia was Cantonese-inspired
Lin Jie Kong, co-author of Chopsticks or Fork?
Australian-Chinese classics such as lemon chicken, prawn toast and salt and pepper squid, now considered national dishes in Australia, can be traced back to Hong Kong’s old-style cha chaan teng cafes.
Wong, whose parents arrived in Australia from Hong Kong in the 1970s, still has family in the city.
“When I visit Hong Kong my family takes me to where they eat – not tourist places but family-style restaurants with dishes like clay pot rice and whole steamed fish,” she says, adding Chinese restaurants have always been her happy place.
“I was born in Sydney and grew up around Chinese restaurants. I felt very much at home there. You could be as loud as you wanted in Cantonese and no one cared.”
Kong, who was six when she arrived in Australia from Shanghai in 1992, three years after her parents, says her early experiences with Chinese food in Australia were different.

“In the early 90s, most Chinese food in Australia was Cantonese-inspired, so going to a Chinese restaurant as a kid was an exotic experience because sweet and sour pork or sizzling Mongolian lamb wasn’t part of Shanghainese cuisine,” she says.
It makes sense, explains Kong, considering Chinese food in Australia has always mirrored its waves of immigration, starting with the influx of Cantonese migrants in the 19th century hoping to strike it rich during the Australian gold rushes.
“The gold rush into the early 1900s involved a lot of immigration from southern regions of China such as Guangzhou [formerly known as Canton], so the cuisine was influenced by people from that region,” Kong says.
“Towards the latter half of the 20th century we saw more immigration from mainland China, in particular in the last 20 years when Chinese international students brought different cuisines,” she adds.
It feels like we have 10 families around the country who fed us and shared their ups and downs with us
Jennifer Wong, co-author of Chopsticks or Fork?
Of Australia’s population, about 5.5 per cent – 1.4 million people – have Chinese ancestry, according to a 2021 census. As the country’s population changes, so too have people’s tastes.
Big cities such as Sydney and Melbourne are seeing a proliferation of restaurants specialising in Sichuan hotpot, Lanzhou beef noodle soup and Shanghai soup dumplings, Kong says.
But old-school Cantonese-style dishes such as lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork, beef in black bean sauce and deep-fried ice-cream – dishes that occupy a happy place in the collective memory of Australians from a certain generation – can still be found on menus, Wong says.
She adds that many restaurants’ menus reflect the owners’ heritage.
“When you look at a menu, you ask ‘what dishes are classically Australian-Chinese, and what are those that show that particular family’s connections to other parts of Asia?’ It’s really interesting.”
The Lee family, owners of Happy Garden in Darwin, in the Northern Territory, is a perfect example, according to Wong.

While menu items such as braised pork belly with preserved mustard greens, aubergine with minced pork, and salt and pepper tofu reflect the Lees’ Hakka and Cantonese roots, some dishes tell the story of the family’s journey as refugees from East Timor to Portugal and to Darwin.
“At Happy Garden you can order sweet and sour pork but also sweet and sour barramundi [a white-fleshed fish also known as Asian sea bass] because it is plentiful in Darwin,” Wong says.
“But you can also get Portuguese-style chicken and potato dishes or sticky tamarind chicken wings. In East Timor, every backyard has a tamarind tree,” she adds.
Oriental Palace in Hervey Bay, Queensland, pays homage to the Malaysian roots of its former owner Gary Bong. Diners can find char kway teow – a wok-fried flat rice noodle dish popular in Malaysia – and a sambal-based laksa with influences from Kuching, the town where Bong was born.
Wong says researching Chopsticks or Fork? taught her a lot about the generosity surrounding Chinese hospitality.
“It feels like we have 10 families around the country who fed us and shared their ups and downs with us,” she says. “We laughed and cried with them over pots of jasmine and chrysanthemum tea.”

What the book does best is pay tribute to the vital role Chinese restaurants play in small Australian communities, while celebrating the hard-working families behind them.
Many of these places open every day of the year and are where important celebrations take place.
“It’s where you go for your 18th or 21st birthday, or maybe every Thursday night for the past 20 years you’re there with your husband, sitting at the same table, having a glass of wine, ordering the same thing,” Wong says.
“The community really relies on them.”
Where Wong’s family takes her to eat when she visits Hong Kong:

Kai Kai Dessert (29 Ning Po Street, Jordan. Tel: 2384 3862), a traditional Cantonese dessert specialist. Wong loves the black sesame sweet soup.


Ngan Lung Cafe (various branches citywide). At this cha chaan teng, Wong cannot resist a buttery pineapple bun washed down with an iced lemon tea.


Tai On Coffee & Tea (G/F, 830 Canton Road, Yau Ma Tei. Tel: 2385 2774). “My cousin orders the lemon chicken spaghetti,” Wong says of the Hong Kong dish that has been served in restaurants since the 60s.


Bing Kee Cha Dong (5 Shepherd Street, Tai Hang. Tel: 2577 3117), an open-air street stall where the deep-fried pork chop noodles are a customer favourite, and Wong’s go-to dish. “My mum and her family grew up in Tai Hang, on a street next to Bing Kee. All the neighbourhood kids, including the Bing Kee family’s kids, used to play together”, she says.



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A selection of dishes at Happy Garden, in Darwin, Australia. The Chinese restaurant is one of 10 featured in Chopsticks or Fork?, a cookbook of 32 food recipes from across the country that tell the stories of the Chinese-Australians behind them. Photo: Jennifer Wong

Lin Jie Kong (left) and Jennifer Wong, the authors of Chopsticks or Fork?, a collection of stories and recipes from Chinese restaurants in regional Australia. Photo: Jennifer Wong

One of the restaurants featured in Chopsticks or Fork? is T’s in Sheffield, Tasmania, where Hong Kong-born Alex Zhao – pictured with his wife, Sammi – runs the country’s only paddock-to-plate Chinese restaurant. Photo: Lin Jie Kong

Cumin-spiced lamb with hand-pulled noodles at T’s. Photo: Lin Jie Kong

Raymond Ng with wife, Susie, and daughter Emily at his restaurant Raymond’s at Malua Bay. Photo: Jennifer Wong

The honey prawns at Raymond’s at Malua Bay are an example of Chinese food adapted for a Western palate. Photo: Lin Jie Kong

Leon Toy cooks using a wok at Toy’s Garden Restaurant, in Horsham, Victoria. Photo: Jennifer Wong

Gavin Chan, the third-generation operator of Happy’s, in Canberra. Photo: Lin Jie Kong

The entrance to Happy’s Chinese restaurant. Photo: Lin Jie Kong

Wong (left) and Kong also celebrate nostalgic items found in Chinese restaurants, such as serviettes in wine glasses, rose-shaped carrot garnishes, lucky Maneki-neko cats, bamboo plants and goldfish bowls, in their book. Photo: Jennifer Wong 

The sticky tamarind chicken wings at Happy Garden are inspired by the owners’ time in East Timor. Photo: Lin Jie Kong 

Char kway teow at Oriental Palace in Hervey Bay, Queensland. Photo: Lin Jie Kong

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Food & Drink

From lemon chicken to sweet and sour barramundi, recipes in Chopsticks or Fork? tell stories of Chinese immigration in rural Australia


Chopsticks or Fork? is a cookbook based on a TV series of the same name that presents 32 Australian-Chinese food recipes from across Australia and tells the stories of the people behind them.


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Chinese cuisine

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