When I opened Ho Jiak Strathfield 10 years ago, I wasn’t a trained chef. I didn’t go to culinary school. But I knew I wanted to cook Malaysian food for the people of Sydney, so I did something really stupid and opened my first restaurant. I put in all this good equipment but I didn’t really know what to do with it. And for the first nine months of Ho Jiak, I was really just trying to find our identity.
The way I decided to move forward was to make things that were delicious, rather than traditional. For our char kway teow, I wanted to re-create a dish I used to eat at the wet markets in Penang, where my grandma used to take me. It was like an economy kway teow – rice noodles cooked in a big batch with lots of soy. My idea was to turn that into a single dish, cook it with wok hei and pump up the flavour. And when I landed on Ho Jiak’s recipe I thought, “goddamn – this is delicious”.
But when I put it on the menu, everyone said it was the worst, that it wasn’t traditional and it cost too much. But I stuck to it and, over time, we kept improving the dish. After three or four years, people started going, “oh shit, is the best char kway teow in Sydney? Could it be better than the char kway teow we’ve tried in Malaysia?”
At the same time, we got more hate. We kept hearing the same things. But nowhere on Ho Jiak’s website, menu or anywhere do we call ourselves “traditional”. The literal translation of char kway teow is “fried rice noodles”. So technically you can fry rice noodles any way you want and call it char kway teow. That’s the fight we’ve had with the dish over the years.
But when people complain about the price, I think it comes down to perception – the perception that char kway teow should be cheap here because it’s cheap in Asia. But in Asia, labour, rent and ingredients are cheap. In Australia, labour is the most expensive thing about running a business. Here, we pay crazy amounts in rent. Asian ingredients such as lemongrass and galangal are also more expensive here than, say, onions and chilli.
For Ho Jiak’s char kway teow, we make a soy blend, where we simmer multiple soy sauces, sugar and coriander roots over low heat for about half an hour. Then we make a prawn oil, where we saute a bunch of prawn heads until the oil has absorbed all that prawn flavour. That takes another hour.
We also make our own pork lard, by blanching pork fat then putting it into an ice bath. From there, we dice it into equal pieces so they cook evenly in the wok. Then we separate the rendered fat from the crispy pork pieces. That process easily takes two hours.
When we get our daily delivery of fresh noodles, we separate them one by one, by hand, before we portion them and store them in the fridge. This way, the noodles don’t break when you fry them and you end up with nice long strands like you’d find in Malaysia, where noodles are usually kept at room temperature. I think this is the one thing we do that no other Malaysian restaurant in Sydney does.
After all that, we’ve still got to prep the other ingredients – Chinese sausage, fish cake, prawns, garlic and chives – so that when it’s service time, everything’s ready and we can bang out a plate within five to six minutes.
But if we’re really busting perceptions, we really need to talk about the wok. In Asia, every restaurant has a wok and a chef who knows how to use it, right? But if you’re trying to run a wok business in Australia, you’ve got a problem: there just aren’t that many wok chefs here.
I see wok cooking as an artform, and it’s one that’s slowly dying. Wok cooking requires the same skill as working on the pans or a grill, but how many culinary schools are teaching students how to use a wok as part of their syllabus? I think it’s very, very rare, especially in Australia. Very few students are entering the workforce with this skill, and we spend a lot of time and effort training people in it. But as well, many culinary students wouldn’t even consider applying for a job at Ho Jiak. And why would they if they’ve never handled a wok before?
The reason I made this video is because I wanted to make a statement. I’m saying: this is Ho Jiak, we’re in Sydney, and this is what’s happening right here, right now. A plate of pasta can easily go for $30 while Ho Jiak’s char kway teow costs $27. Why is everyone complaining about the price of one and not the other? Initially, all I wanted to do was raise awareness. But then Asian business owners from all over the world started jumping in the comments and saying, “yes, I get it. This is happening with us, too.”
But what hit me even harder was when people from other cultures started speaking up. Mexican business saying how undervalued their tacos were. Vietnamese businesses saying the same thing about the banh mi versus other rolls and sandwiches. Ravioli versus dumplings and dim sims. The comments just started going boom, boom, boom.
When I opened the first Ho Jiak, I was a nobody. I didn’t have the social media presence or platform to educate people. Back then, when people would leave negative reviews saying my char kway teow wasn’t authentic, or too expensive, I’d have to reply to every single customer, one by one. And believe me, after 10 years, it’s still happening. The difference now is we have social media and I can make a video that shows people how much time and effort goes into a “simple” plate of noodles.
If you read the comments on that video, a lot of people say those perceptions are rooted in racist attitudes. For me, this isn’t about racism. I’ll happily pay $30 for a good plate of pasta. Just don’t complain about a $27 plate of char kway teow when it’s just as good (or better) and there’s so much more work involved.
