Redbird doesn’t fly, so what is Sydney’s best Chinese?

Underwhelmed by fancy rebooted Chinese in Redfern, The Mouth names his top five favourite suburban Chinese restaurants? Do you agree? CAST YOUR VOTE

Redbird’s take to classic prawn toast. Picture Supplied.

“No regrats”, the poorly considered tattoo reads, and it’s good advice no matter how you spell it.

So no, we never got to fly the Concorde (boo!), and worse, we never got it together to buy a terrace in Redfern 20 years ago when prices were cheap and the greatest risk was sharing a common wall with your insufferable art critic neighbour.

We thought about this the other night when we sat down at Redbird, a new “modern Chinese” in the heart of what is rapidly becoming a very classy and tasty bit of this slice of the inner city.

Certainly the new offering from Hamish Ingram and Rebecca Lines has been the subject of a lot of hype, but in too many ways it just fell short.

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Yes, some dishes (mostly starters) landed right in our fun zone: pork and scallop wontons, and a nice tribute to the classic prawn toast – though still not a patch on what’s on offer at Lee’s Fortuna Court.

Fried rice with chunks of Chinese sausage (lup chong) was very tasty but was one-dimensional, while a sort of Szechuan braised eggplant came with a beautiful, deep sauce yet was texturally as pleasant as a paper straw that’s been left in your vodka lime and soda too long.

Some dishes at Redbird land right in the fund zone. Others didn’t quite work for The Mouth. Picture: Supplied

The signature “Jurassic quail” was good if hard to eat and not a headline capable of carrying the whole story.

We wanted to like Redbird, we really did. Fresh, modern, rebooted Chinese in a city with almost too much Thai seemed natural. But somehow it didn’t quite work for us.

There were other things, too.

We may be showing our age but does the menu have to be printed in a point size smaller than the fine print on the dodgiest credit card application?

And for a cuisine that’s all about sharing and multiple dishes, the tables are hopelessly narrow (as confirmed by at least one smash we heard during the night).

Redbird’s modern exterior. Picture: Supplied.

Underlying it all is what might be called the Sydney food scene’s Hollywood Problem: Everyone’s just trying to retell the same stories in different ways.

On one level, Redbird’s “modern Chinese” is more admirable than Instagram-worthy Frenchy theme parks or Chicago speakeasies: A succulent Chinese meal is far more authentically Australian than Captain Renault or Al Capone.

But on another it is all a sort of parody conservatism, a gastronomic “young fogeyism” which instead of wearing spats and straw boaters sees hospitality PRs send an endless stream of press releases containing the word “homage”.

— The Mouth is an anonymous critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.