Just In: Lee Ho Fook, Melbourne’s Hot-Listed Chinese Diner, Is Coming to Sydney

In the same week Sydney welcomes two new Chinese restaurants – Big Sam Young and Grace Chen’s celebration of Westernised dishes, and the Clam Bar team’s big, red-lit CBD dining room heroing the Guangdong and Sichuan regions – we have news of another on the way soon: Lee Ho Fook, the Hot-Listed Melbourne restaurant from Victor Liong.

“We’ve had this on our pulling-the-trigger list for a while,” Liong tells Broadsheet, referencing his partnership with Trippas White, the group behind dining in the Opera House and the just-revamped Infinity by Mark Best. “I’m pumped to bring Lee Ho Fook to Sydney.”

Lee Ho Fook Sydney will open next month inside The Porter House Hotel in the city.

The modern Chinese restaurant isn’t bound by any one region of China. Liong’s deft techniques – honed via kitchen time at Mr Wong and the now-closed Marque, and stints working with Neil Perry, Sixpenny ’s Daniel Puskas and Cafe Paci’s Pasi Petӓnen – explore the breadth of the cuisine, reinterpreting it with premium local produce. “We cook through the Australian lens, in terms of the style of food we serve and the way the guests will be eating. A lot of it is still Chinese techniques, flavours, you know – we’re rooted in that.”

Lee Ho Fook first opened on Smith Street in 2013, before moving in 2015 to its current, larger location off Flinders Lane. All long-time fans of the original will be pleased to know that the Sydney and Melbourne menus will be almost identical.

That means signatures from the lengthy a la carte menu – like pork and chive dumplings with chilli oil, and prawn toast crowned with sea urchin – will be there. And that exceptional crispy eggplant in spiced red vinegar? “100 per cent. 100 per cent. That’s also why I’m so pumped about doing [Sydney]. We’ve cooked hundreds of thousands of portions of this over the last 12 years, and to be able to do it in another restaurant that is another Lee Ho Fook, in Sydney, which is where I’m from, is great. It’s sick.”

There will be Skull Island prawns, Glacier 51 toothfish and Peking duck, too.

“What we’re trying to do is bring as close to the Melbourne restaurant to Sydney as possible … [We will be] also developing a few things that will be distinctly and exclusively for Sydney, but we haven’t quite figured out what that is yet. We’re still finalising menus and suppliers. The ethos will still be the same: premium, local ingredients, with Chinese techniques and flavours.”

Liong’s siblings all work in hospitality too, and his sister Nianci Liong (ex- Momofuku Seiobo, King Clarence, Fred’s) is joining the Sydney project to lead front of house. “It’s just the stars aligning. We haven’t really worked together before … I go to the table and I tell the story about my grandma – you know, this is the flavour profile of my childhood. And she had the same grandma and same childhood, so it helps.”

Brad Guest is joining as head chef, with a starry CV spanning Shell House Dining Room & Terrace, Sepia, Bilson’s, Rockpool, Sixpenny, Oncore by Clare Smyth. Bookings are now open.

Lee Ho Fook will open at The Porter House Hotel, 203 Castlereagh Street, Sydney, on Wednesday September 17.

@leehofooksyd