First Look: Almost Every Table Gets the Double-Skinned Milk Pudding at Shunde Cuisine

The ethos behind food from the Shunde district in southern China is simple: let the natural flavour of each ingredient sing. There’s a heavy seafood focus due to Shunde’s proximity to the Pearl River, and chefs are light-handed, relying on minimal seasoning and gentle techniques like baking, braising and steaming to create dishes that are more than the sum of their parts.

“[It’s] quite light,” Lana Tan, co-owner of new CBD restaurant Shunde Cuisine, tells Broadsheet. “Not everyone will love Shunde cuisine.”

Shunde is in the populous, Cantonese-speaking Guangdong Province. Although technically a district of the larger Foshan city, Shunde is generally treated as a separate city from a cultural perspective. A major food tourism destination, Shunde was named a Unesco Creative City of Gastronomy in 2014, partly in recognition of its role as the cradle of Cantonese cuisine – there’s even a Chinese TV show, A Bite of Shunde , dedicated to showcasing its culinary prowess.

Tan opened Shunde Cuisine at the end of July with her husband Billy Fong (a former chef at Crown’s Man Tong Kitchen ) and chefs Zhongrui Chang, Guoqiang Pan and Mingchun Cai. Tan, Fong and Chang are behind Hakka Cuisine in Camberwell and Jade Village in Mitcham, but this isn’t their first foray into serving Shunde food – they also ran Camberwell’s now-closed Shun De House.

The sprawling, three-storey Shunde Cuisine is big, taking over the former Wagaya site in the CBD’s Midcity Centre, with 400 seats and seven private rooms (each with its own karaoke system).

Tan’s feeling that Shunde food may not be for everyone means the menu also has an extensive number of dishes from other cuisines including Hakka, Sichuan and Southeast Asia more broadly. Chefs Pan and Cai oversee the kitchen. With Cai responsible for the lunchtime dim sum offering, which has classics as well as adventurous riffs such as an avocado barbeque pork bun and a durian mille-feuille.

But as the restaurant’s name implies, the Shunde food is the reason to come.

Everything is slow-cooked over low heat, or not cooked at all. “When you use a super strong flame to cook Shunde dishes, it will spoil [its] freshness,” Tan says. Ceviche-like raw seafood – oysters, crabs, salmon and more – cured in a spicy lime marinade that Tan likens to a Thai papaya salad dressing, is a favourite here among the younger crowd.

But the best-seller is dessert: the double-skinned milk pudding, which Tan says almost every table wants to end the meal with, often runs out before service ends. A traditional Shude dish, the pudding is made by boiling milk twice: once on its own, which is when the first skin forms, and again with egg whites and sugar, when the second skin forms.

Tanks are filled with live seafood that can be cooked a number of ways. There are 16 different preparation styles (not all of them Shunde) for the shellfish alone, ranging from simple salt-bakes and stir-fries to indulgent additions of Singaporean chilli crab sauce, foie gras or black truffle paste.

For a Shunde-style take, Tan recommends the three-flavoured fish platter. The kitchen steams your pick of coral trout, morwong, cod or parrot fish three ways. Each preparation is accompanied by a different condiment – black bean paste, green peppercorns and Hainan yellow lantern chillies – to bring out different flavours in the fish.

Shunde Cuisine
Shop 201, Floor 2 Midcity Centre, 200 Bourke Street (Enter via lift near Little Bourke Street entrance)
03 9087 8928

Hours:
Daily 11.30am–3pm; 5.30pm–11pm

@shunde.cuisine.au