“I feel that this is actually going to be my moment. Do you think?” Tony Tan asks in classic Tony Tan style, confident and self-effacing all at once.
We’re doing dishes after lunch at the chef’s home in Trentham, about an hour’s drive from Melbourne. Tan washes, I dry. He’s just finished teaching a Southeast Asian course as part of his self-run cooking school. Tan is a kind yet thorough teacher, who serves a kind of loving Asian aunty energy that reminds me of my own Chinese Malaysian mum. Standards are high, but there’s love (and a lot of expertise) in every correction or piece of knowledge.
He makes sure to always keep the mood light and shares jokes with his students – regular members of the public who have come to learn, and, though they never say it aloud, to hang out with an unassuming kitchen icon on his home turf.
Efforts are rewarded with a lunch that today includes beef rendang, bebek betutu (Balinese roast duck), punchy terong balado (Indonesian sambal eggplant), chicken satay with peanut sauce and char kway teow (Malaysian stir-fried flat rice noodles).
But once everyone leaves, the chef is left to clean up. It’s odd to see someone of his status doing dishes. Stars really are just like us.
Tan saying 2024 is his moment is perhaps odd when you think about his achievements and the longevity of his career. He’s been part of the culinary conversation since opening Tatler’s Cafe in Sydney in 1983, where he made a name for himself cooking dishes like rocket salad with char siu pork and pumpkin pasta with a hint of oyster sauce. He was a host on SBS’s The Food Lovers’ Guide to Australia in the 1990s, and his time in people’s living rooms turned Tan into a household name among certain subsections of the Aussie public.
Even with that pedigree, this year has been particularly big. Tan got married at Dave Verheul’s Russell Street restaurant Embla, went on a long honeymoon with his husband, and is about to release his new book Tony Tan’s Asian Cooking Class, which took him three years to write and is the first work the chef has published since his 2017 title Hong Kong Food City. Understandably, he describes his current state as “overwhelmed.”
The new book is a proper cooking bible – hefty, instructive, generously written, gorgeously presented and full of kitchen inspiration. Drawing on decades of experience, Tan covers well-known classics like Cantonese fried rice, Singapore chilli crab, laksa and pandan chiffon cake – plus deeper cuts like Xinjiang lamb skewers, roti john fried French bread and Rajasthani watermelon curry. He also includes explainers on Asian pantry staples (including which oils and stocks to use when), plus instructions on how to season and cook with a wok.
It feels like Tan is on the verge of another, later-in-life breakout ahead of his book release. Maybe the culture is finally ready to meet him where he’s been for years. I tell him his current trajectory reminds me a bit of fellow Malaysian Michelle Yeoh. Like Tan, the actress has been working since the 1980s, but has only really gotten her flowers in the past few years.
He balks at the comparison. “God, do I look like a celebrity? I am not!”
While it’s true that Tan has never quite reached the levels of fame other Australian celebrity chefs enjoy, he’s not jealous or resentful of those who get more attention than him.
“‘One mountain always likes to compare itself to another mountain that’s higher,’” he says, translating a Chinese proverb “Yi shan you bi yi shan gao” for me. “By that expression, it just means you like to think that you’re bigger. But in actual fact, there’s always a mountain even higher than you are. You can never reach the pinnacle, because the pinnacle is unattainable.”
Not that he doesn’t have his moments of anxiety. “Every once in a while, I would turn around and say, ‘Why is he or she doing much better than me?’ But that’s okay. It’s because it’s their journey.”
Tan can also rest easy knowing his life has given him a unique and irreplicable culinary education. “For me, it’s the kind of journey that has got a lot of layers – layers upon layers of understanding of flavours.”
The chef’s Hainanese parents were part of Malaysia’s large Chinese diaspora. Before Tan was born, his mother learnt how to cook in the houses of British colonials before Malaysia became independent in 1957. Her Western food repertoire included butter cakes, plum puddings and other “English-style” dishes.
His father managed government accommodation and, by the time Tan was born, ran his own hotel in Tan’s hometown of Kuantan, a small city on Malaysia’s east coast. The family employed Cantonese chefs who cooked food that was “completely different” from the Hainan food his parents had growing up. He helped out in the restaurant from as young as five or six: “I can still smell the tonnes and tonnes of prawns that I peeled.”
Tan’s parents sent him to Melbourne at “the end of the hippie period” to go to university and study to become a lawyer, engineer or an accountant. But then he discovered Lygon Street and was set on a different path. “There was the smell of pot in the air, and there were all the Hare Krishna people … I’d never seen all that in my life.”
He first started working at vegetarian restaurant Shakahari in Carlton, which still exists today. Then he dropped out of uni and went to study at Leiths School of Food and Wine in London and La Varenne cooking school in Paris. When he eventually moved back to Melbourne after closing Tatler’s Cafe in Sydney, he went back to university and got a degree in Chinese, French and Renaissance history. He was cooking ticketed lunches for Stephanie Alexander and about to embark on a masters degree when he got a call from a producer asking if he’d audition for an SBS show “and that changed everything”.
Now in his third act (or maybe 12th, depending on how you count it), Tan is thinking about his legacy. “I’m not showy, but I hope that people will respect and acknowledge what I do,” he says.
He’s also thinking about the future and turning his garden, where he’s currently raising chickens, into an “edible forest” with an Asian bent. He’s planted bok choy, osmanthus and citrus trees, and one day hopes someone who shares a similar food philosophy to him will take over.
“I believe very, very strongly in leaving a legacy for the rest of the world,” Tan says. “We are now living in a world where there are so many problems, from anything that’s environmental to climatic, to political and so on like that. In a very small way, what I’m doing is trying to encourage people to see that we’ve got to leave something for the betterment of society or for the world.
“That’s a reason why I want to start the food forest and to have chickens and all that sort of thing. Because that means I’m also reducing my carbon footprint.”
We go outside to feed the chooks and I have one final question for Tan. Is it finally his moment?
“I think. But then, you know, it’s taken 40 years.”
This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.
See details on Tan’s book tour here.
