Kylie Kwong is meant to be on a walking interview, but she wants me to try some chicken first.
It’s Tuesday morning at Sun Ming BBQ House in Parramatta, in Sydney’s west, and the dining room is already full of Asian elders brunching on the restaurant’s famous siu mei (Cantonese roasted meats). The soy chicken lands on the table, bone-in, glossy-skinned, and with a side of ginger and spring onion dipping sauce. Then: a plate of fried rice, studded with glistening jewels of lap cheong and curls of chopped omelette; and roast duck, ordered to the table by David Chan, whose family has run the restaurant for 31 years.
“There’s a lot of food,” says Kwong, the household-name chef, author, TV presenter and – now former – restaurateur, picking up her chopsticks. “And we’ve got one more place to go too, OK?”
It’s been almost two months since she closed Lucky Kwong, her modern Cantonese eatery in South Eveleigh, bringing to an end a 24-year career running restaurants. And in the days since, she’s been doing what chef-slash-restaurateurs rarely have the time or energy to do: cook for her spouse, and eat at restaurants that are not her own.
For her wife, the artist Nell, Kwong has been serving comfort food: dal, steamed fish, salads. “We eat quite simply at home,” says Kwong. “I like light food … and Nell’s the same.” . And last week in Parramatta, her new stomping ground as an associate of the Powerhouse Museum’s food program, she ate at five restaurants in one day.
This kind of sharp-eyed, suffer-no-fools, borderline-obsessive discipline with which Kwong approaches her work is underscored with compassion and care. Kwong admits she has few roots in Parramatta: she was raised in North Epping, her restaurants were based in the inner-city or Potts Point, and she’s lived in the eastern suburbs for the past 18 years. So eating five lunches in a single day is her way of talking and engaging with local restaurant owners in her new gig. It’s her “softer side” emerging, says Kwong.
“For the last 30 years, I have been a boss and an employer and the decision maker every day … And then during service, calling the pass, boom, boom, boom, boom.
“Now in this new chapter, I’m really enjoying just letting the softer me come through.”
After Kwong packs the meal’s leftovers into containers, Sun Ming’s restaurant manager insists the meal is on the house; it is hard to do “I’ll pay the bill” battle with a stubborn Chinese auntie in hospitality mode. Kwong steps on to Church Street and breaks into a brisk march, clutching her bag of takeaway duck, her phone GPS navigating the way to the next stop – she’s still learning the streets, after all.
We walk through Parramatta Square, a shiny, smooth-concreted pedestrian and commercial district that underwent a $2.8bn dollar redevelopment several years ago. “There’s a lot of very modern-style contemporary food outlets. I prefer the traditional family-run businesses,” says Kwong.
Our next stop, Saravanaa Bhavan, may be an international restaurant chain, but it is extremely popular with the South Asian community who come for the all-vegetarian south Indian menu. Kwong suggests we share a thali and some fresh juices.
Recently she was at a restaurant industry event and was talking to a well-known Sydney chef-owner who was grappling with the rollercoaster of sporadic patronage, rising costs and a head chef who had resigned after just four weeks. “And I thought to myself, do you know what? I don’t miss that,” says Kwong. “But at the same time … I’ve had so many more positives than negatives in my life as a chef and a restaurateur.”
“I’m 55 now. I’m not saying I’m old … [but] there have been several times in the last year or so where I’ve said to Nell and some of my friends, I can’t see myself being a restaurateur and a chef for ever … I don’t want to be standing behind the stove when I’m 60.”
She realised there was another way to be in food, without being in commercial kitchens. Women, friends like Stephanie Alexander and Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo, had done it before her. “They’re still working so hard, full-time, [and] trail-blazing. And I thought … I’ve got this whole other chapter in me.”
She hopes the industry is more sustainable for future generations. Lucky Kwong was only open for weekday lunch, to the chagrin of some. But after 19 years of dinner service at Billy Kwong (which originally opened in Surry Hills with the late Bill Granger in 2000) it was one way to restore some equilibrium to her life. Restaurant-running is a notoriously difficult vocation – which is mostly fine when you’re younger, she says, but for chefs who’ve gone the distance, the antisocial hours and minimal financial return take their toll.
“My hope would be that it became a lot more rewarding in that sense for people to balance all of the hard work and blood, sweat and tears they put into it. And all of the things that restaurateurs and chefs miss in their life because they’re too busy behind the stoves,” says Kwong.
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The one material thing she does miss, however, is Nell’s ceiling installation that hovered over the Lucky Kwong dining room, featuring five hand-blown glass ghosts suspended from a steel branch. Titled Ghost Song for Lucky Kwong, it’s named in honour of Kwong and Nell’s son, who was stillborn in 2012. “It’s almost like his spirit was hovering in the space,” says Kwong. The work was put in storage after the restaurant closed, though one of the glass ghosts sits on their bedroom altar to Lucky. “But he’s with me, in my heart,” says Kwong, tapping a ghost-shaped brooch, also by Nell, on the left side of her shirt.
A few years after Lucky’s death, on Nell’s 40th birthday, Kwong proposed with lotus flowers, a garland of jonquils and a copper ring. “Because we’d had such a dreadful time [grieving Lucky], I wanted it to be something that she would remember with deep happiness.” The couple were married in a small ceremony in 2019, with their son’s ashes on an altar. “To anyone contemplating marriage, get married. I thoroughly recommend it.”
Kwong counts the “Lucky tragedy” as one of several turning points of her life, like “coming out” as gay to her father at 19, leaving advertising to become a chef at 24, opening Billy Kwong. And listening to René Redzepi at the Sydney Opera House in 2010, where the Noma chef questioned why there were so few Australian native ingredients on local menus.
“[Redzepi said] how important it is to use produce that is native to the country that we’re cooking in order to express the flavour, the story, the history, the memory, the sense of that country.” It was a lightbulb moment for Kwong. The next day, she began trying to source native ingredients for Billy Kwong. She calls it a “very deep and meaningful journey” – one that she’s still on.
The Lucky Kwong menu featured warrigal greens, samphire and sea parsley sourced from Jiwah, a nearby native rooftop garden. A garden with edible native plants is also on the cards at the Powerhouse, as is a 200-seat demonstration kitchen and a food education program for high school students, with input from entomologist and edible-insects purveyor Skye Blackburn, and Kamilaroi man and science educator Corey Tutt.
“[What] I love about the Powerhouse is the positioning or the attitude of service to the community. It’s my spiritual viewpoint as well.” (Kwong follows Zen Buddhism, but “can’t sit still” long enough to practise meditation.) “So mix all of that in with food culture, it’s like, this is the best job I’ve ever had.”
We leave Saravanaa Bhavan – with more takeaway in tow – and Kwong makes a wrong turn which takes us past the Powerhouse construction site, a beast of scaffolding and concrete whose clangs of hammer and steel echo down Phillip Street – it’s slated to open in 2025. After Kwong finds her bearings, we pass the dilapidated facade of the former Roxy theatre, dwarfed by cranes that are building the Parramatta metro station next door. Kwong walks down a laneway and into Temasek, the Singaporean restaurant that’s been serving laksa and Hainanese chicken rice since 1992.
It’s not open today, but co-owner and chef Jeremy Cho is there to greet Kwong with tea and kueh – and the 140 litres of sambal and laksa paste he’s just cooked, enough to last the kitchen a week. The dining room is decorated with faded posters of Singapore, and is rich with the fragrance of dried prawns, ginger and garlic. It is Cho’s and Kwong’s first time meeting, yet they speak gently but candidly about restaurant life, their mothers, and grief. Kwong has a remarkable memory, and despite meeting them only once before, on her five-restaurant tour, she can recall the names of Cho’s aunt, uncle and cousin who help run Temasek.
We leave, of course, with another takeaway container – a serve of Cho’s laksa paste, with his handwritten instructions for turning it into laksa soup. Kwong takes me to the temporary offices of the Powerhouse, which overlook the construction sites of the museum and the metro. She’s three weeks into her “office job”, train commute, hot-desking, laptops and all – she shows me her packed snack of almonds and dried fruit.
She is excited about this new phase of her career – though the kitchen still calls. In the first week, she moved her laptop to the communal kitchen to concentrate. “Nell’s like: you always have to be near the fridge,” says Kwong. “I felt very at home.”
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This story was updated on Saturday 24 August, 2024 to correct the name of the native rooftop garden near Lucky Kwong restaurant.