Queen Chow

Justin Hemmes and his team have a flair for creating dramatic and whimsical restaurants. Queen Chow is no exception.

John Lethlean

2 min read

12:00AMMarch 11, 2017

Good fun: and if you like Cantonese food, you’ve come to the right place. Picture: Jane Dempster

Another night, another Merivale restaurant. Welcome to my world. As an outsider looking in, it sometimes feels Sydney’s fertile, perhaps over-fertilised restaurant scene can be divided into just two camps: those run by the family company named after CEO Justin Hemmes’ mum, and the rest. It’s a task keeping up with it all.

So the good news? It’s not like we all have to eat in places run by Kim Jong-un. Hemmes’ staggering collection of eateries includes places on my must-visit list for years, like Mr Wong, and newer restaurants with the same status, like Fred’s. And I haven’t been to half of them.

But don’t think Queen Chow will make that must-do list, despite being yet another amazingly realised fantasy world, this time within an old Enmore pub. Hemmes and his team have a flair for creating the dramatic, the whimsical. Here, at Queens Hotel, food is just a part of the mahjong set.

It’s been reinvented as several venues in one: the refurbished pub downstairs, a cozy lounge bar called The Smelly Goat on the first, bleeding into a Cantonese dining room intended to be “your new favourite neighbourhood Chinese”. Provided, I guess, you live in the inner west.

The pub decor is a hoot, going right up to the border of Over The Top and jumping on the brakes: a fun pastiche of English excess. Hilarious taxidermy, raj portraits, box-framed gentleman’s smoking pipe collections and lashings of mock Victoriana. More than just a generous budget, it’s clever.

In the restaurant, shrewd lighting, mock shutters, fans and tessellated tiling create the mood of a colonial-era Hong Kong club. It borders on sensory overload, but that’s the kind of thing this crowd trades in when it comes to props and sets. And it is, when all is said and done, theatre, with food and booze.

The latter seems fairly priced: a belting rosé from Orange, the #004 Swinging Bridge, is $58 against a typical retail price of $30, and well suited to QC’s very accessible Cantonese favourites.

Unlike a few mod Chinese in Melbourne (think Ricky & Pinky or Lee Ho Fook), this place plays a straight, low-intervention chef bat. The kitchen is interpreting rather than inventing. And if you like Cantonese food – and who doesn’t? – you’ll like Queen Chow.

The steamed dim sum (pictured) is clearly hand-made, with ingredients you probably won’t find in Chinatown (beautiful scallop, for example), but, like most of the food, arrives a little closer to tepid than hot. The kitchen is downstairs, the restaurant up… this needs to be addressed.

Silken tofu discs with vegetarian XO sauce and mushroom floss, with pickled long beans, is about as creative as QC gets for us, and a lovely dish. Scallops steamed on vermicelli with a mild, dark and penetrating XO are straight and very fine too, but at $7.50 per, a treat.

Salt and pepper squid, prawn and silken tofu is served with a chilli mayo; honey-glazed pork neck, sliced thick, with their fairly posh house fried rice with cuttlefish, char siu pork and sweetcorn. Lovely, but again this is something that should have the whisper of the wok. Ditto a special of garlic chives flashed with macadamia, baby corn and chilli.

There are a couple of fancy (good) desserts but it’s difficult to go past a fresh fruit platter, isn’t it?

Comparisons may be odious, but in this case, they’re inevitable. It’s not Mr Wong. But it is a fun, well run, Gen X/Y version of your local Chinese. Without the Chinese.

It’s quite the thing these days.