Five Minutes With: Melbourne Legend Duré Dara of Nudel Bar and Stephanie’s on Her Hospo Career

The first thing Duré Dara OAM does when I arrive at her home is fuss over me. It’s a wet Melbourne day, and before I properly sit down, she’s found me a handtowel, made me a hot Earl Grey tea and set down one of her favourite cardamom rolls. Then, while making sure I’m comfortable at her kitchen table, she asks a few deft questions and quickly finds common ground. She’s Malaysian, I’m Indonesian – close enough to be siblings, she decides.

When she’s done fussing, she brings out photographs. One shows the front of Stephanie’s, the Hawthorn restaurant where she started as a waitress and ended up running the place as co-owner with Stephanie Alexander in the ’80s and ’90s. “Did you go?” she asks. I didn’t. “I would have loved to have looked after you,” she says. “Very few Asians came.”

Dara is a fixture of the Melbourne food world. She was a partner in Donovans and, in 1996, opened Nudel Bar on Bourke Street, where Ombra now lives. Regulars came for noodles dishes from across Asia, southern Europe and eastern Europe. The Asian food in particular was exacting, generous and deeply considered. “My wontons were like fucking goldfish in the soup,” she says laughing. “And my kway teow – I think the staff nearly killed me because I kept saying, ‘No, it’s not good yet.’”

She became the first female president of the Victorian Restaurant and Caterers Association. For two decades, she convened the Victorian Women’s Trust. In 2001, she was made a Legend of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. This month, at 80, she was the guest of honour at a dinner thrown by the festival. She called it a celebration of plenty. There was a performance by Speak Percussion celebrating Dara’s four decades playing improvised percussion. Andrew McConnell designed the menu.

But the truest way to understand Dara is not through the honours, or even the institutions she helped shape. The through line of her life is not simply making beautiful things, but carefully creating the ideal conditions in which other people can receive them.

“I didn’t have music [at Nudel Bar]. Nobody ever complained. Because it was still buzzing. It was harmonious. It smelled good, it looked good. Just beautiful things.”

Beautiful, too, is her name: Duré. From the Persian durr, meaning pearl. She was born in Malaysia in the unsettled weeks after the end of Japanese occupation. Her father Ali Iqtidar Shah Dara, was one of the great field hockey players of pre-Partition India. In the 1936 Olympic final, with Adolf Hitler watching from the stands, India defeated Germany 8 to 1; her father scored twice. The war brought his regiment to Malaysia, where he met Dara’s mother, a Christian Malaysian painter. After the partitioning of India, he became part of Pakistan’s rise in world hockey, as both player and coach. Religion alone made Dara’s parents’ relationship forbidden. The ethnic and political tensions of the time made her existence almost impossible. 

She grew up in her grandmother’s house, surrounded by aunts and uncles, in the unruly tenderness of a large family. Her grandmother, widowed, had raised six children alone. “I was a tiny little girl, and I had a very romantic life,” Dara says. 

When she came to Australia as a high school student in 1962, she found herself in a country that could be hostile. Strangers told her to go home and to leave Australian boys alone. The result was not defeat so much as a sharpened wit. “Rather than fighting,” she says, “I became a kind of smartass. And I don’t like it, and I still don’t like it. But it was a way of surviving.”

Eating well became part of her survival, too. She and a few Asian friends invented reasons to gather and go out together. “‘It’s the festival of the third moon,’ or something,” she says. “We’d all go out and eat. The eating was very special.”

The meals were joyful. The racism and condescension around them were not. But if her life in Australia required performance, defiance and improvisation, it also honed her greatest skill: listening. 

At Stephanie’s, at Nudel Bar, in her music, in the way she places a towel in a guest’s hands, Dara’s gift has always been compositional. She arranges feelings. She senses texture. She adjusts tempo. She notices small details that make the crucial difference between an average dining experience and a great one.

She remembers a woman at Stephanie’s, who, arriving furious, flung a fur coat in Dara’s face. “You give her a quiet corner, so she can eat and gnaw on bones in peace.” She knew what to do with someone who was in awe of the grandeur of Stephanie’s. “If somebody comes in and they’re completely overwhelmed by the magnificent billiard room – that was one of the dining rooms – you give them the best seats and they will just blossom. They will just love it.”

I tell her Stephanie Alexander, in a 1996 interview, named a dinner she'd had with Dara at Chez Panisse as her most dazzling food memory. Dara looks surprised. She goes quiet for a moment before speaking. “It was broad beans, with salt and pepper,” she says. “And then Alice Waters waited until the end and brought us four strawberries. So humble, so special.”

I ask her what other experiences she counted among her best meals. “I don’t really need to go to the best restaurant in the world,” she says. “I love eating hawker food that is clean. You’d sit astride a drain with the monsoon rain flowing in it and it would still be fabulous, because it was hand-done by somebody so beautifully.”

Then she says something that’s as much a life philosophy as a dining preference. “I don’t have a best. I don’t need to have a best when I’ve got plenty good.”