HONG KONG — There's a so-called Chinese restaurant in most small towns in Australia, but few of them serve the kind of food a gourmet would expect to see on the menu.

These restaurants are rarely celebrated and the origin of their staple dishes is often questionable.

Fare such as honey chicken, lemongrass pork and fried ice cream won't catch the attention of inner-city foodies looking for authentic Chinese food, but for other diners the menu items can be a trip down memory lane — to a childhood birthday, a first date, wedding receptions, funerals and sometimes even Christmas.

A new television series set to air on Australia's government-funded ABC network in mid-2021 celebrates the nation's small-town Chinese restaurants, with producers also negotiating a run on ABC Australia, the international network that broadcasts across Asia.

Chopsticks or Fork? is a six-episode series that goes beyond the wok and straight to the people behind some of Australia's most remote Chinese kitchens. Each show takes place in a different restaurant in one of six towns across four states and territories.

The first stop, New Bo Wa Restaurant in Moree — a town with a population of about 7,000 on the black-soil plains 500km northwest of Sydney — took one of the two Chinese-Australian journalists behind the show straight back to her childhood.

"A moment that made me go 'oh my goodness' was the first fried ice cream we had on this trip in Moree," says writer and comedian Jennifer Wong, 40, of the dish which has murky origins, with some suggesting it may have originated in Hong Kong in the 1980s.

"I hadn't had one since I was eight years old. It had the cherry on top, the wafer sticking out. I just felt like a kid again. It was all these happy flavours from your childhood just coming back to you as an adult. It was wild."

Ms Wong, whose parents migrated from Hong Kong to Australia in the 1970s, says the experience of eating in some of the restaurants was almost like entering a time capsule. "You walk in and you feel like you could be somewhere in 1985 — and the menu hasn't changed significantly either over that time," she says.

Chopsticks or Fork? is close to home for both Ms Wong and co-writer Lin Jie Kong, 34, who migrated to Australia from Shanghai as a two-year-old and grew up in and around her parent's fish and chip shop in suburban Sydney. Today, Ms Kong is a senior producer and director at ABC.

"It's been this cathartic reflection on my own experience in Australia and where my family is from," Ms Kong says of the show.

"So many of us have similar yet different stories and we're all around Australia. It's not just centring around the main metropolises of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, (which have) lots of Chinese people."

Though most restaurants featured in the programme offer some sort of Chinese cuisine, they each have a different background, influencing the menu and flavours of individual dishes, Wong says. Owners often liked to localise dishes, too.

"There are little things that restaurants do that celebrate where they are in the world," she says, pointing to Raymond's in Malua Bay, a town with a population of roughly 2,000 on the coast south of Sydney, where Hong Kong actor and martial artist Jackie Chan once dropped in for dinner.

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Owned by Mr Raymond Ng, 75, it sources honey from a beekeeper in the nearby town of Mogo for its honey chicken and prawns, Ms Kong's favourite dishes.

"We have to say, we've never had something like that before," says Ms Kong of Raymond's recipe. "When we ate it, it was just like, 'Woah'. It was incredible."

The variety of non-Chinese dishes on the menus of these regional restaurants — from chicken nuggets to a Thai kuay teow noodle dish — was particularly interesting, Ms Kong says.

"A lot of these people in the town expect the same taste they grew up with, so it's like a lot of these menus are a time capsule into an Australia of the late '70s and '80s," she says. "On Raymond's menu, you still get your sweet and sour pork, nuggets and chips, fish and chips, and at the same time dishes like oysters Kilpatrick."

Now clocking up 40 years in Malua Bay, Mr Ng has faced hard times.

He has been forced to change location three times and almost closed his restaurant for good after it fell victim to the summer bush fires of 2019, which torched about 54,000 sq km in New South Wales alone, according to Australia's Climate Council.

Mr Ng's store burned down on Dec 31, 2019 and reopened on Oct 1, 2020 in a new location.

Another diverse menu can be found at Gawler Palace Chinese Restaurant in Gawler, a town of about 26,000 people roughly 40km northwest of Adelaide.

Run by a Vietnamese family, Gawler Palace serves Chinese food alongside Thai dishes including lemongrass pork and chicken, Ms Kong says.

In Hervey Bay, a coastal town some 250km north of Brisbane with a population of about 50,000, a Chinese restaurant called Oriental Palace has served the community for over three decades.

Chinese-Malaysian Gary Bong bought the restaurant in 2010 from his Malaysian uncle, who had won A$2 million (S$2.05 million) gambling in Queensland and no longer wanted to run it.

On its menu is a laksa that Mr Bong's mother served for decades in her restaurant in Malaysia, as well as curries, nasi goreng (Indonesian and Malaysian fried rice), and of course a couple of Chinese-Australian dishes such as lemon chicken.

At the Happy Garden restaurant in Darwin, capital of Australia's Northern Territory with a population of nearly 160,000, the owners' Portuguese and Timorese heritage has influenced a number of dishes, including sticky chicken wings with tamarind sauce, taro pork and a roast pork laksa.

One sizzling beef dish, a prime Scotch fillet priced at A$38, was Ms Wong's favourite and another example of cultural blending, she says.

"It's got a really tangy sweetness, which apparently came from a Hong Kong chef who wanted to make the dish suitable for a Western pallet," she says, adding she tasted hints of ketchup in the dish.

Ms Kong says she got the idea for Chopsticks or Fork? about three years ago at a Chinese restaurant in a small town on the northern coast of New South Wales, which is not featured in the series.

"I remember calling Jen and saying, 'Woah, this is like the best Chinese I've ever had. Why is it in this little town? And why are these people doing this?'"

Wanting to learn more about the history of the country's small-town Chinese restaurants, the pair began to research them and were later lucky to pique the interest of an ABC executive.

"When we pitched these stories, we were very much about the fact that they were Australian stories," Ms Kong says.

She hopes the series will encourage viewers to acknowledge the restaurant owners' efforts. "People got quite emotional in these interviews because it's the first time in a very long time that they have had the chance to sit down and reflect on their successes and failures," she says.

"I think for us it's important for them to understand that their stories are valued and that their community appreciates their food."

Ms Wong says filming the series helped her connect with her culture because she was introduced to other Australians of Hakka descent. She hopes the show will provide a chance for the owners to see themselves in a different light.

"We were just lovingly welcomed into all these families, and it's like we have extended family in six places in Australia now," she says.

"Whenever we tell someone about the series, their eyes light up because everyone's got a story about a Chinese restaurant in a regional Australian town or a country town, or a memory of growing up with eating Chinese food.

These restaurants are where the communities celebrate; they celebrate their birthdays and their anniversaries here. There are a lot of access points to this show, but it's really just a very Australian story." SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST