Few snacks provoke as many conflicting feelings as the dim sim. Devotees will express both disgust and admiration, sometimes in the same breath. A dimmie equals cultural cringe in some circles; for other people, it’s a point of pride.

Unlike meat pies or pavlova, it’s one of the few snacks that’s unquestionably Australian. And Victorians have a unique claim: Melbourne is the birthplace of the dim sim as we know it today.

It was here that William Chen Wing Young manufactured the first dimmies through his food business, Wing Lee. They were frozen and then sold (steamed, not fried) from caravans at sporting events. Many reports claim this happened in 1945, but his daughter, leading Chinese chef and author Elizabeth Chong, disputes that.

It was in 1942 that she says her father took the steamed Cantonese dumpling, siu mai, mainstream.

“My father saw that [siu mai] were something that Australians really loved. Every time they’d go to a Chinese cafe, they would order them,” Chong says.

Usually made with pork and prawn and only partially wrapped, the siu mai became the dim sim as Chong’s father adapted to local conditions. Wartime meat rations led to him ditching prawn and adding cabbage and celery. The wrapper had to be thicker and cover the filling so it could be frozen. And the dumplings were made bigger to compete with the meat pie.

The Wing Lee brand is no longer, but its creation lives on. Described by former MasterChef host Matt Preston as “big fat brutes of things”, dim sims are today slipped into paper bags at service stations and school canteens, added on to orders at the fish and chip shop, queued up for at South Melbourne Market and bought frozen from the supermarket aisle.

Ray Shoesmith, the grinning hitman of Australian television series Mr Inbetween portrayed by actor Scott Ryan, is incredulous when one of his associates confesses he’s never tried one. “Mate, you’re not an Aussie if you’ve never had a bloody dimmie.”

“Some people think of them as bastardised siu mai, and a crime against southern Chinese food,” says Pat Nourse, creative director of Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. “To me, they’re evidence of a part of our Chinese history that survived the White Australia policy and flourished against the odds.”

Regardless of when dimmies were created, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival will honour them by giving away 1000 at an event called Dim City on March 28. These won’t be your standard fish and chip shop variety, though.

Three inventive young Melbourne chefs, Rosheen Kaul, John Rivera and Eun Hee An, were asked to put their spin on the dimmie. What they’ve come up covers sweet and savoury, steamed and fried, and cuisines as different as Korean, Filipino and Australian.

“We’re not looking to improve on perfection here, but rather expand on what a dimmie can be in Melbourne in 2025,” Nourse says.

Adaptation is an essential part of the dim sim’s story. Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, a senior lecturer in Australian history at University of Sydney, says this was common among Chinese migrants, as far back as Australia’s gold rush of the 1850s.

“You had to find food items that would appeal to both local Chinese people and to Europeans. That was how you were going to survive financially. The dim sim is a wonderful symbol of that innovation,” she says.

Loy-Wilson believes the dim sim caught on for two reasons. Firstly, for many years, Australia’s workforce comprised mostly manual labourers.

“It’s a wonderful working-class food because it’s portable, it’s cheap and it’s also high-calorie,” she says.

The other reason, she speculates, is that restaurants run by Chinese migrants in regional towns helped spread the concept of the dim sim.

“It’s actually really cool because from a very young age, Aussies are kind of taught to appreciate different cultural foods,” says Rivera, chef-owner of Askal, a Filipino restaurant in Melbourne’s CBD.

Each chef involved in Dim City describes the puzzling moment they first laid eyes on a dim sim, when they expected something closer to what gets wheeled around on a yum cha trolley.

“I was a little bit shocked,” says Eun Hee An, who runs Moon Mart cafe in South Melbourne. “It’s a lot more rough than a delicate dim sum.”

But a dimmie is its own thing. Accept that or be forever disappointed.

“The beauty is in its roughness,” says Kaul, former head chef at Etta and regular Good Food contributor. “That thick pastry holds that really low-quality soy sauce that you dip it in. You don’t know what meat it is, but it has a whiff of mutton. Sometimes there’s cabbage in it, sometimes there isn’t.”

Hee An has also come around. “If you eat it with tomato sauce instead of soy sauce, it’s very good. It feels a bit more like a sausage roll to me.”

Rivera says that fried dim sims tick many of the boxes chefs strive for in their cooking, especially texture and umami.

For Dim City, each chef has tapped their own upbringing for the dimmie they’ve created.

Hee An is doing a fried pork and kimchi dim sim with comte sauce. Cheese and kimchi are very popular in Korea, she says. “Cheese is funky and so is kimchi, but it’s a different funky.”

Kaul’s dimmie is of the steamed kind, filled with a juicy chicken and lamb meatball, with a fresh green chilli and coriander salsa on the side and peanut-sesame sauce for dipping. She was inspired by China’s soup dumplings, including xiao long bao, and also rou jia mo, the north-western Chinese “burger” that’s filled with cumin-spiced lamb.

There’ll even be a sweet dim sim at the giveaway, courtesy of Rivera, who also runs a string of Filipino ice-cream shops, Kariton Sorbetes. He’s bringing to life a childhood sweet, turon, that’s similar to a banana fritter. Using banana cake, macadamias, a Vegemite-spiked butterscotch sauce and freeze-dried banana, it will present every bit like your standard dimmie.

“It’s an absolute mind trip because the filling itself looks like mince … What should be savoury is actually sweet,” Rivera says.

Could a new and iconic snack come out of the event? Possibly. But the dimmie is a hard act to follow.

Dim City, March 28, 1pm-4pm at Emporium, 287 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne

melbournefoodandwine.com.au