Lunar New Year: Meet Melbourne's artisan producers of auspicious Asian ingredients
The suburban kitchens and garages of Melbourne have spawned thriving artisan food business for families of Asian migrants, and right now they are frantically gearing up to celebrate Lunar New Year.
Some of these businesses began recently, when great family cooks were encouraged by friends to share a taste of home; others have been selling traditional dishes from domestic kitchens for decades. Each is fiercely specialised, taking multi-generational family recipes and introducing them to the rest of Australia.
To honour the first day of Lunar New Year, here are 10 local producers with stories as authentic as their products.
Hong Kong Dim Sum (dim sum)
Andrew Leung's father, Kong Choi Leung, has been a dim sum chef for more than 50 years. "My parents moved here in 1983," says Leung. His father, who turns 72 this year, is the patriarch of Hong Kong Dim Sum.
The family business started out selling handmade products from a chest freezer in the garage, evolved to supplying Chinatown's top restaurants, and opened its first shop in 2001. There's now a restaurant in Glen Waverley, with another on the way in Doncaster East. Leung senior tried to retire in 2017, but he could not stay away.
"When his dim sum chefs retired, dad came out of retirement to take over the shop. We wanted to keep the traditions alive because it's a dying trade," says Leung.
Kong, who once turned down a gig catering for Qantas, sells thousands of siu mai and har gau dumplings every week. During last year's lockdowns, Hong Kong Dim Sum dumplings sold faster than toilet paper rolls.
New Year specialties such as turnip, taro and water chestnut cakes are always on the menu, but production increases five-fold this time of year.
- Order at hongkongdimsum.com.au or visit 77 Kingsway, Glen Waverley, for takeaway or dine in.
Hou Mei Homemade (char siu puff)
Carmen Wong (right) fell in love with Melbourne as an international multimedia student. She returned to her Hong Kong homeland after her course, but moved back here six years ago to take on a huge career change.
"I could not forget Melbourne," she says. "After many years sitting in front of a computer, I started to study cooking and patisserie, because I love it."
Wong studied at William Angliss before setting up Hou Mei Homemade cooking school. Like many during lockdown, she pivoted to food delivery.
Char siu (barbecue pork) puffs quickly became her most-requested dish; a fusion of Cantonese cooking and her newly acquired patisserie skills. Whereas traditional pork puff pastries use lard, Wong incorporates butter.
Hou Mei Homemade also caters for private functions and cooks feasts in people's homes. She is booked out for Lunar New Year, but will continue to deliver char siu puffs and reopen for home catering and cooking classes once it passes.
- Order at houmeihomemade.com.au
Wan Li Xiang Foods (bak kwa)
Bak kwa is the Chinese equivalent of jerky. The sweet and salty dried snack is usually made from pork and it's in high demand during Lunar New Year because of its lucky red colouring.
In 2012, Sharon Wong moved to Melbourne from Singapore, where bak kwa is especially popular. It's the same in Malaysia, her husband's birthplace.
"My husband had received this bak kwa recipe from a relative whose family were not keen to continue the business as they are all successful professionals," says Wong.
She started to make the jerky herself, particularly in the Chinese New Year period when "we crave it", and it was a hit among friends, who encouraged her to turn it into a business. That was eight years ago.
Wong marinates the pork, flattens it, dries it and barbecues it before sending her bak kwa around Australia to her word-of-mouth customers. Recently she shipped 40 kilograms to a single address in Queensland.
Wan Li translates to "far away", while "xiang" means fragrant. Bak kwa is Wong's way of bringing a taste of home to Australia.
- Order at wanlixiangfoods.com
Viet Soul (lap xuong)
Vietnamese lap xuong isn't as dry as lap cheong (Chinese sausage), explains Khoa Le. She's been a chef in Australia for 15 years, initially immigrating from Ho Chi Minh to study accounting.
"Instead of spending time to study in libraries, I spent most of the time in the kitchen cooking for my friends who lived in the dormitory," says Le.
She switched to commercial cookery and later opened Viet Soul in Flinders Lane. When the restaurant closed down just before COVID, she turned it into a home business. It wasn't until last year that Le decided to specialise in lap xuong.
"This product is very traditional when it comes to Lunar New Year. People love to have this one as a gift to give to their loved ones. There's not really much of this product on the market," she says.
Le uses pork leg to control the fat content in the sausages, which are used in fried rice dishes and many other Asian savoury dishes as a flavour-packed base, seasoning them with char sui powder, ginger and garlic powders, curing salt and Chinese wine. They're dried for eight hours in 10-kilogram batches.
She currently works full-time as a chef at Melbourne University's Ormond College and only makes and sells lap xuong for a few weeks leading up to Lunar New Year. Outside of that timeframe, it's a minimum order of five kilograms.
- Order on facebook.com/VietSoul381
CCwok (pork knuckle & yu shang)
Cecilia Chuah had a full-time sales job when she started baking Malaysian and Singaporean pastries. She registered CCwok in 2019, slowly expanding her menu until it culminated in CCwok restaurant opening in November 2021.
Every Tuesday night for the past two years, Chuah has also fed the homeless near Victoria Market. She never misses a week and will be there on New Year's Day.
Chuah normally cooks traditional Malaysian food, but this year her customers can order Lunar New Year specials alongside her signature nasi lemak and her mother's dumplings, of which she sells more than 1000 a week.
On the celebratory menu are pineapple tarts, peanut cookies, yu shang (raw fish salad that's tossed for good luck, pictured below) and a slow-cooked pork knuckle dish made with auspicious fat choy (black moss).
"Everything is about luck and money," laughs Chuah. "My normal style of cooking is just home; not the fancy restaurant. It's all based on the heart and how I want to cook."
- CCwok's New Year dishes are available to takeaway until February 13 at 464 Victoria Street, North Melbourne. Order at ccwok.com.au.
Ny Ratna Kitchen (lontong cap go meh)
Lunar New Year is known as Imlek in Indonesia, while Cap Go Meh marks the final day and 15th night. It's as big a deal as Imlek and is celebrated with lontong cap go meh, a prosperous dish centred on lontong (rice cake).
Ny Ratna Kitchen in Highett serves it East Javanese-style with telur bumbu petis (egg cooked in sweet, blackened shrimp paste), ayam (chicken) curry and daging Bali (spicy Balinese beef). The egg represents a fresh start for the year, golden curry symbolises wealth and the red daging prosperity.
Lontong cap go meh is a once-yearly special with only 100 serves available – making the banana leaf-wrapped rice cakes alone takes a few days. The dish symbolises both the melding of Indonesian and Chinese cultures, as well as longevity.
"Chinese people married together with Indonesian people and mixed, and their traditions also mixed," explains Paulus Tedjalaksana, who runs Ny Ratna Kitchen with his wife, Ratna.
- Ny Ratna Kitchen, shop 1, 133 Chesterville Road, Highett. Traditional Indonesian dishes are available for takeaway and third-party delivery year round via nyratnakitchen.com.au. Lontong cap go meh will be delivered on February 5 and 12 only.
MaMa Gourmet Delight (prosperity dishes)
Elaine Chooi's mother started baking karipap pusing (flaky Malaysian spiral curry puffs with chicken or sardine filling) in Melbourne in 2017. Demand outgrew her domestic kitchen, and the mother-daughter duo moved to a commercial kitchen inside the Clayton Church of Christ, where they also donated meals.
When COVID hit they relocated to Oakleigh South, but the biggest change came when a group of mums were looking for extra income to help them through the pandemic's hardships. MaMa Gourmet Delight expanded to accommodate them.
"All of us are migrants born in Malaysia. As the team grows, we have to grow our menu," says Chooi.
Up until 2020, MaMa Gourmet Delight only offered curry puffs. It's now made up of eight mothers who cook part-time, each bringing their own Malaysian recipes to the business.
During Lunar New Year, they offer auspicious dishes such as ang ku kueh (red, koi fish-shaped cakes), salted egg cookies, yam cake, golden pineapple tarts and yu shang "prosperity toss" salad, a traditional raw fish salad (often salmon) with mixed shredded vegetables, which MaMa Gourmet Delight makes from scratch using local ingredients.
Each ingredient has a different association. The pronunciation of "raw fish" sounds like the Mandarin word for abundance. White radish is linked to progress, carrots to luck, peanuts to a wealthy home, sesame seeds to prosperity, and so on. Friends and families gather around the platter and toss the ingredients together with chopsticks while shouting wishes. The higher you toss, the better.
- Visit facebook.com/mamagourmetdelight for a list of distributors or to order
PBK Noodles (noodles)
Noodles are an essential part of any Lunar New Year banquet as they represent longevity. PBK Noodles in Clayton makes up to 200 kilograms a week using a customised machine from Jakarta, with people ordering family-sized mee goreng and frozen noodles for at-home celebrations.
"During Chinese New Year, noodles are a must; you can't not have them," says owner Michael Samsir. "Even during birthday celebrations, noodles represent longevity, the wish of a long life."
Samsir has Hakka Chinese ancestry but was born in Indonesia. Before opening PBK Noodles in 2014, he worked at Telstra.
But when his team was retrenched, Samsir decided not to wait to see when it would be his turn. His family ran a noodle shop back in Jakarta, so he figured he'd give it a go here.
"My customers say that you can't beat the springiness and the chewiness of our noodles," says Samsir. "Most are made from an extrusion process; we make it from a folding process. We fold it a lot of times and that makes the texture different."
- PBK Noodles, 354 Clayton Road, Clayton, pbknoodle.com.au. The noodles are also available at Grand Laguna in Hawthorn and Point Cook, Lion City Grocery in Mount Waverley and Toko Nusantara in Noble Park.
Baba's Wife (kueh)
Karen Chan is Melbourne's unofficial kueh queen. Kueh, pronounced "kway", are traditional Peranakan cakes often made from ingredients such as palm sugar, glutinous rice, coconut and pandan.
Peranakan people, also known as Straits-born Chinese, are the descendants of intermarriages between the first Chinese people who migrated to the Malay Peninsula and Indonesian Archipelago, and the local people. If you've ever slurped laksa, you've tried Peranakan food.
Peranakan women are referred to as Nyonya and the men as Baba, hence the name of Chan's business.
The most popular kueh at this time of year is ang ku, or red tortoise cake. The Chinese character in the centre of the turtle shell-shaped sweet translates to longevity. The red cake is made with glutinous rice flour and sweet potato and filled with mung bean paste – and symbolic meaning.
"You must have red at Lunar New Year," says Chan. "The chewiness of it symbolises that you gel with your family members, and it's round, therefore it symbolises love and the lifecycle."
Chan quit her job as a research director at a search firm last year to turn her hobby into a full-time gig.
"I loved my job, I loved working with my colleagues, but I thought, I've just got to give it a go," says Chan. "My boss said, 'Well, when you're done with this mid-life crisis, you can come back!' That was in August."
- Baba's Wife only takes orders online via popoh.com.au, but also supplies kueh to Bamboe Indonesian Restaurant in Camberwell, Panda Panda in QV, Sunny Degrees Gelato & Cafe in Balwyn, and Warung Kopi in South Yarra
Mumchan (jeon & tteokguk)
Alum Choi was only four years old when the family moved to Melbourne from Seoul. She recalls her mother cooking more than half a dozen banchan (Korean side dishes) for her father every mealtime.
In Melbourne back in 1989, you couldn't pop to the shop to buy kimchi. "The only way was to make it," says Choi. "I didn't realise how much work and effort went into it."
She managed Korean restaurants in the city for 10 years before buying a small sushi shop on Little Bourke Street with her husband. They decided to turn it into the first Mumchan in 2019, specialising in banchan. There's also a larger restaurant in Laverton.
Mumchan has some 85 banchan on rotation, including seasonal white cucumber kimchi and jeon (fritters), a Seollal (Korean Lunar New Year) specialty.
A table might also feature japchae glass noodles, bulgogi beef stir-fry and tteokguk, a rice cake soup where cylindrical cakes representing longevity are sliced and served in beef bone broth. Aside from the latter, available only as a Seollal special, the rest are on Mumchan's regular menu.
- Mumchan, 1B Triholm Avenue, Laverton; 395 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne; or order at mumchan.com
