The Rice Den

Jacqui Taffel

September 18, 2015

Chinese$$

Chandos Street, St Leonards, is not the kind of place that springs to mind when planning a fun night out with friends. Yet on a cold night, in a gloomy canyon of empty office buildings near the Pacific Highway, a glowing corner beckons.

Inside, it's warm and buzzing with diners and staff. The concrete-floored room is artfully decked out with hanging birdcages, wooden abacus joinery and artful floral wallpaper; it makes me think of In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai's modern classic set in Hong Kong in the 1960s. But this is modern Sydney, where Chinese dining has undergone a velvet revolution as the next generation of restaurateurs rises through the ranks. The chairs are upholstered in colourful Tibetan-style fabric, a shelf holds bottles of Prickle Hill Worcester sauce made near Wagga Wagga, and the bartender looks as though he's just in from an epic surf.

Rice Den's co-owners and head chefs, Roy Chan and Nelson Cheng, became friends while boarding at north shore private school St Joseph's College. Chan bought his first restaurant at 22, where the staff thought he'd never last. They underestimated him. "I'm from Joeys, I'm competitive," he says.

The pair opened the first Rice Den in Chatswood but within a year outgrew the small space. The larger St Leonards digs has a new level of sophistication, in the fit-out and the menu, which mixes modern and traditional Cantonese flavours, split into small eats, bigger eats, rice and noodles, and desserts. Where in the past we might have steered clear of a Cantonese banquet menu, here we leap on it. It's $40 a head for 10 share dishes, and means less time deciding what to eat, more time chatting.

The service is good, starting from the booking. As is now common, Rice Den does two sittings on Fridays and Saturdays. From a small business point-of-view, this is understandable, but it's tricky if you're paying for a babysitter. You don't want to be in at six and hustled out at eight, while sitting down at 8.30pm means you don't eat until nine which causes grumpy husband syndrome. When I plead my case, I am given 7.45pm.

So we are happy before we even sit down. The food makes us happier, from the complimentary fried wonton crisps with our pre-dinner drinks, to the heart-stopping, breakfast-for-dessert French toast with dulce de leche, peanut crumble and matcha green tea mascarpone we finish with. A soft and squishy square brick, it's like the lumpen lovechild of bread-and-butter pudding and a donut.

Other highlights are the hand-made cheong fun in sesame and hoisin sauce, like slippery Chinese gnocchi; the burstingly plump and juicy chicken, prawn and shiitake dim sum; a snowy slab of barramundi topped with a tangle of chilli, ginger and green onion; and the slow-braised beef cheek – so tender, so much flavour. Even the steamed broccolini stands out with its bright, emerald crunch; the tea-smoked chicken salad is good too, though it's not on the banquet menu.

A bottle of light, spicy Valpolicella Allegrini goes with everything, and the sultry Buddha's Tears cocktail with lychee and rose petal garnish proves surfer boy is more than a pretty face. Small finishing touches also impress – the clever shelf with built-in wine buckets, the surprisingly tasty brown rice tea, and the photo gallery in the corridor leading to the loo with faded family snaps of Hong Kong trips and school-boy surfing safaris.

The Rice Den manages a fine balancing act, doing thoroughly modern Chinese with a sense of fun and a keen eye honouring the past.