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CRITIC’S PICK

First, let’s manage expectations. You can’t book a table at Ama, order a cocktail or slide into a booth. The kitchen is likely to run out of your first three choices if you don’t get there early, and nothing costs over $20. It’s not exactly your average Surry Hills restaurant.

Sisters Rowena and Kate Chansiri first opened the pup-friendly Ickle Cafe in Kingsgrove in 2022, after Kate had been roasting coffee for four years – so what chance their next step would be a noodle bar in Surry Hills? It happened almost by accident.

When their mother made a special visit from Bangkok last year, she brought her own mother’s recipe for Chinese Thai beef noodle soup with her, a traditional family taste she had grown up with since the 1960s. “Ama’s” (grandmother’s) soup was soon on high rotation – and so much so, says Rowena, that they had the bright idea of doing a small two-night dinner pop-up in the cafe, to share it with others.

That was a hit, prompting the pair to look further afield for a permanent home for the beefy soup noodles. They found a light-filled, glass-fronted premises in a side street of Surry Hills, and opened in September.

There’s something special here that takes me back to the early years of both Billy Kwong and Boon Cafe.

The kitchen is tiny, the dining space is simply but brightly furnished with red lanterns and tiles. Family knick-knacks sit on one wall, and shelves of produce, noodles and bottle sauces line up on another. But the star of the show is the beef noodle soup ($19.90).

Damn, it’s good. Noodles sit at the base (go for the more substantial egg noodle over rice noodle). There are hunks of oh-so-tender corned beef brisket, brined for six hours and slow-braised for 10 hours, as well as a chunk of meltingly soft beef short rib, still on the bone; an undercurrent of five-spice throughout. A thatch of pickled mustard greens adds savouriness, bright snappy greens add crunch. There’s a ladleful of fragrant beef broth, but it doesn’t swamp or drown. Oh, and three little beef balls, to add to the textural house party.

Eat it with fork and spoon, or spoon and chopsticks from the help-yourself cutlery tin. In fact, don’t just eat it. Commune with it. Nobody slapped this together in haste; it’s been done carefully and caringly. There’s something special here that takes me back to the early years of both Billy Kwong and Boon Cafe.

“I think every country in South-East Asia has its Chinese-influenced dishes,” says Rowena. “But because we are Thai, we like salty, sweet, acidity and chilli, so we do it our own way.”

There are other things, of course, if they haven’t sold out already. Like big, floppy pork and prawn wontons, topped with fried garlic and a puddle of soy and ginger sauce ($9). Silky, sweet, terrific. Less savoury, but very comforting, are the salapao ($4.50), of soft, pull-apart bao buns stuffed with pork belly or veg and salted egg yolk – good filler-upperers for the kids.

Also on the comfort spectrum is the braised pork belly on rice ($20) with pickled greens and black olives; and slow-braised chicken layered over glass (cellophane) noodles ($18.90) with mustard greens and fabulously bitter ridged melon.

To my fairly savoury palate, some dishes are quite gentle, but there’s a lavender plastic condiment basket of sugar, fish sauce, dried chilli flakes and chilli vinegar if needed.

For dessert, a cold, junket-like, soybean pudding ($8.90) arrives in a tall drinks cup, studded with cubed fruit and chewy little coconut jubes. It’s worth ordering coffee, too, with Rowena roasting in order to bring out the best in the carefully sourced beans rather than to any pre-determined flavour profile.

Ama may not be your average Surry Hills restaurant, but I wouldn’t mind at all if it was. If they all welcomed you with a smile, fed you bowls of food steaming with goodness, and smelled sweetly of five-spice and pork belly, that would surely be a good thing.