In Brisbane Times’ Heartlands series, Food and Culture Editor Matt Shea seeks out the migrant restaurants, cafes and stores that give the city’s food scene its rich texture. This month, a south side restaurant that’s become a go-to spot for luscious, fragrant char kway teow.

“Do you sell pad Thai?”

Leen Lai lost count of the number of times she fielded this question when she and husband Kian Lai first opened Uncle Lai’s.

“Back then, a lot of Aussies only knew of pad Thai,” Leen says. “I think it’s only in recent years – maybe the last decade – when a lot more Australians have travelled to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, that they’ve really come to appreciate char kway teow.”

It’s true. These days, Australians definitely know char kway teow, or “CKT” as it’s often abbreviated, and food-focused Brisbane locals will readily debate who does the best. Ya Hoo Dining in Upper Mount Gravatt often gets a shout, and a Malaysian-born former Brisbane Times staffer used to enjoy the CKT at Lemak, which has a few locations dotted around the city. This writer has heard good things about Little Nyonya Kitchen in Ferny Grove, and not a week goes by where I don’t miss the char kway teow from the now-closed Noodle World in Sherwood.

Still, in 2025, one venue tends to come up more and more when talking about Brisbane char kway teow: Uncle Lai’s. It’s perhaps surprising for a restaurant that opened in 2017, which, with those weird lost years of the pandemic, feels very recent.

But Uncle Lai’s story goes back to Malaysia, where Kian’s father, Anthony, worked as a wok cook (the traditional way, over charcoal), and then New Zealand, where the family migrated in 1990 (and Kian and Leen subsequently met).

Anthony later opened a restaurant, Malaysian Noodles and Rice House, in Avondale, south-west of the Auckland CBD; over the ensuing years it developed a reputation for cooking some of the best Malaysian food in that city.

Kian and Leen moved to Brisbane in 2011 after it was decided at a family meeting to introduce their char kway teow into Australia. Still, it took another six years to settle on a location.

“It was a new country so we weren’t sure about investing $300,000 in a shop,” Leen says.

“We wanted to settle. Also, we travelled to Melbourne and Sydney just to get a bit more of an understanding of the market, and after that we decided on Brisbane,” Kian adds.

The original Uncle Lai’s was situated in a poky shopfront on Logan Road in Mt Gravatt. And, true to Leen’s pad Thai story, it took a little while for word of mouth to spread.

But then a Brisbane food blog wrote about Uncle Lai’s. And then the pandemic happened, turning locked down locals towards neighbourhood operators like Kian and Leen. Perhaps the game changer, though, was when the South China Morning Post covered the restaurant via its Goldthread YouTube channel.

“We did notice that,” Leen says. “That’s obviously aimed more at a Chinese market, but I think they get a lot of American Chinese and Canadian Chinese viewers. We actually had someone from Canada fly in to eat our char kway teow, which amazes us … they’ve said, ‘We’re going to fly there and eat this dish.’”

So what makes Uncle Lai’s char kway teow so good? You suspect Kian’s years of growing up in New Zealand have lended him the wry, laconic brevity with which he bats away your investigations.

The sauce? It’s a secret. The noodles. Secret. The lap cheong? Secret.

“We actually had someone from Canada fly in to eat our char kway teow, which amazes us … they’ve said, ‘We’re going to fly there and eat this dish.’”

Leen Lai

“Our rice noodles are direct from the supplier – his nephew is one of our good friends and customers,” he says. “So they’re made and the next day they’re on the truck and in our kitchen … It’s a brand you can get from an Asian grocery, [but] they’ll tend to be two weeks old when you buy them in the store. If the noodles aren’t fresh you don’t get the same smoothness and bounciness.”

“The lap cheong sausage is locally made in Northern NSW,” Leen adds. “It’s premium grade. People wonder why we do that but it makes a difference.”

It does. There’s no denying Uncle Lai’s Kuala Lumpur-style char kway teow (so, fatter noodles and a darker sauce than, say, a Penang-style CKT, Kian says) is one of the best in town, and perhaps one of the best noodle dishes, full stop. It’s luscious without being oily, the prawns and chives full of colour. And you can smell the wok hei as soon as it hits the table.

There’s just so much attention to detail, from Kian’s insistence on cooking each CKT individually, to the flecks of fried pork fat that come scattered throughout the dish, adding pops of flavour and texture.

In the years following the pandemic, Uncle Lai’s char kway teow became so popular, you often had to order ahead to avoid missing out. But a move last year to larger premises in Greenslopes has helped take the pressure off the kitchen (which, by the way, also punches out a fine laksa and fried rice).

“The move has been great for us,” Leen says. “We’ve a few plans for the shop, such as add a shade out front, but otherwise we’re very happy here.”