East Meets East: Hornbill Sarawak Delicacies Is a Monthly Pop-Up Bringing Eastern Malaysian Cooking to East Perth Train Station

The East Perth train and bus station – officially known as the Public Transport Centre – is your gateway to many destinations. Buses can get you to Geraldton in the north, Kalgoorlie to the east and Esperance in the south. A handful of trains pass through the terminal, including the cross-country Indian-Pacific – one of Australia’s great rail journeys and a bucket-list trip for any train enthusiast. Even the station’s brutalist architecture temporarily whisks you back to the ’70s. Since late last year, the station has also been helping transport people to Sarawak, a lush, biodiverse East Malaysian state on the island of Borneo.

You won’t find Sarawak on any departure boards or bus timetables. Instead, begin your search on Instagram: specifically, the account of Hornbill Sarawak Delicacies, a pop-up that takes over the station’s Whistle Stop Cafe and Kiosk one Saturday every month. Run by a group of Sarawakian expats moonlighting from their day jobs, Hornbill is as much about curing pangs of homesickness as it is about sharing culture.

“After living in Kuching [the capital of Sarawak] for 25 years, these are the dishes I would eat two or three times a week and things that I really miss,” says Linus Chin, an accountant by day and one of the core quartet behind the pop-up. Together with wife Megan Lim (a dietician), Jason Wee (a robotics engineer) and Sacha Arthur (a government project manager), Chin established Hornbill after learning to cook the Sarawakian dishes he couldn’t find around Perth. “The focus of Hornbill wasn’t only to serve that dish, but to also bring that experience and feeling to Perth of sitting at a kopitiam [the Malay word for coffee shop] and waiting for your meal. We try to discourage people from taking away and want them to come in to sit with us and eat so we can talk to you about Kuching and maybe recommend places for you to go if you visit.”

While Perth is well catered to with Sarawakian, and even specifically Kuching-style cooking – we see you Two Hands Noodle Shop and KCH! – Chin and co have managed to pinpoint a few lesser-seen dishes from the Sarawak playbook to share with eaters. The star of the show is kueh chap, a southern Chinese noodle dish featuring rice noodles in a soy sauce-based soup crammed with porky all-sorts. Hornbill’s version features eight different cuts of pork – including small and big intestine, plus tongue – and a gently spiced soup made using Sarawak white pepper. You’ll not be wanting for flavour or textures.

Following the first pop-up in November last year, the team has introduced two more core menu items. First is the curry banjir, which features the same porky deliciousness of the kueh chap, only the meat is served on rice rather than in a bowl with noodles. The second is the braised pork leg rice, a gelatinous jumble of slow-cooked trotter meat that should ring a bell for eaters familiar with the Thai-Chinese street food favourite khao kha moo. The menu might be small – and admittedly meaty – but the kitchen makes sure each dish counts and sings with hometown flavour and savour.

The crew plans to add more dishes to its repertoire in future, starting with ayam pansuh (chicken cooked inside a length of bamboo) which will make its debut at the June pop-up. A dish eaten by Sarawak’s indigenous Dayak people, ayam pansuh was chosen by the group for two reasons: first, Wee, Hornbill’s head chef, is part-Dayak, and secondly, it ties in with the Gawai Dayak festival – an annual celebration held at the start of June. The chicken dish is yet another way team Hornbill wants to share Dayak culture with Perth.

Follow Hornbill Sarawak Delicacies on Instagram to find out about coming pop-ups.