A brief requiem to the Chinese-Australian restaurant
When the time comes, and the last of their kind are shut down and sold off, who will remember the old Chinese-Australian restaurant?
When the time comes, and the last of their kind are shut down and sold off, who will remember the old Chinese-Australian restaurant?
I do not mean the ones that thrive along fashionable city streets and laneways, or even those lonely suburban shacks lit by pulsating neon signs at night. I mean the endangered ones, beyond the conurbations, in the bush and country; the ones with the dodgy landlines, grotty laminate menus and gloriously kitsch names like Dumpling Dynasty this or Golden Century that.
They don’t do cross-cultural fusion in these joints, unless you count Mongolian beef and a case of long necks as cross-cultural. They don’t do authenticity either, unless you count prawn crackers and vinyl chairs as authentic. The cluster of fleshy blokes wolfing down their trough of sweet n’ sour pork couldn’t care less about the chef’s Cantonese credentials. And the truth is no one does — not even the chef. What happens behind the fly curtain, out the back with the wok and steamer, is nobody’s business, least of all the customer’s.
I was reminded of these sobering truths not so long ago, when a friend in regional Queensland described in graphic detail how his local Chinese restaurant had managed to take out half the town following a Saturday night banquet bender.
The trail of carnage was long. White-coated men bearing clipboards and furrowed brows were sent in to clear the site of any residual radioactivity. Bad reviews followed, and the place took a momentary hit on TripAdvisor. But eventually local hostility tempered and normal business resumed.
“Surely the owners have been run out of town by now?” I asked. “Not a chance,” my friend said. “This place is an institution, and it’s going nowhere.”
My first memories of “eating out” can be traced back to one of these institutions, the Chinese Village Restaurant, not far from the Victoria-NSW border. Like most of its kind, its decor was distinct and garish, drenched in a surfeit of bright colour and dim light. Its walls were covered in thick puce carpets, the white tablecloths splayed with violent lashings of brown sauce and lager.
As you entered, passing under a glowering portrait of Puccini’s Turandot, you were met with a powerful waft of peanut oil, garlic and warm armpit. Now you had reached the epicentre, not just of the restaurant but of local activity itself. Above all, this was a place of theatre and commotion, a nostalgia den for the boisterous and hearty; for the post-match football team, for the big family dinner, for the lone boozer keen to line his stomach before he went again. As a child I sat in thrall to the pageant of local eccentrics and despots who came through these doors in search of sustenance and good company.
Sadly, the original restaurant is no more. It traded in the puce carpets for a “pan-Asian style menu” and moved to more salubrious digs across the road. According to those who knew, it had buckled under successive waves of “urban modification and renewal”, the last of which emerged from North Naarm and advanced up the Hume Highway like a panzer division headed for Paris.
In its path it claimed the Chinese Village Restaurant and the old Imperial Hotel down the road as two of its final scalps. (Formerly a pub of ill-repute, the Imperial now serves cheese platters and flies rainbow flags at half-mast from the balcony.)
While it’s doubtful the culinary purists of the imperial court would’ve found much to admire in a lazy Susan stacked with monster servings of lemon chicken and special fried rice, perhaps they would’ve appreciated the flushed and exuberant faces of those loyal patrons who, decade after decade, drank and imbibed and occasionally even regurgitated their way through to the last double banana fritter of the evening.
These are the men and women who will remember.
And you can be sure, somewhere tonight, along the main drag of a small country town, those same loyal faces will be there again — ready to salute an institution they know well, right down the last prawn cracker and dumpling.
