Pilar Mitchell

I met Sharon Kwan in autumn 2019. Summer’s furious heat had started to give up the ghost and, as I rode the bus down Parramatta Road each day, I watched an inconspicuous catering shopfront morph into a restaurant. “Sharon Kwan Kitchen, flame-grilled Asian chicken” read the sign in the window. To be honest, it was an undersell. What I tasted during my first visit wasn’t just another take on charcoal chicken. Sharon’s was among the most heartfelt, comforting Malaysian cooking I’d ever tried in Sydney.  

The restaurant was an exercise in contradiction. Outside was Parramatta Road in all its rough, loveable ugliness. Inside was a room filled with the beautiful aroma of fried curry leaves, pandan-scented turmeric rice and the layered spices of beef rendang, all woven together with Sharon’s magnetic energy. She was everywhere in that space, fussing good-naturedly over customers, shouting out an energetic conversation from the kitchen, slipping extras into takeaway parcels and smiling broadly. 

When I left that day in 2019, my head was full of stories and my arms were laden with food to bring home to my family. In the years that followed, I visited her regularly, either for another story or because I was craving her rich, tamarind-laced chicken curry. She was forever giving me more than I ordered: the fixings for fragrant laksa, boxes filled with crepe-fine popiah (fresh spring rolls), containers of her incredible sago and palm sugar syrup dessert. We always did the same dance: I’d protest and try to pay for the extras, she’d smile and brush me off. 

I got to know her over the years, learning about her grandparents’ market noodle shop in Petaling Jaya, her parents’ pork butcher shop, her education at renowned hospitality school Les Roches in Switzerland, her move to Australia in 1989 and the Bondi eatery where, in the early noughties, she pivoted from serving European food to Malaysian when her customers discovered the magic of her homestyle cooking. 

She weathered a lot of change, but nothing ever seemed to shake her determination to feed her customers. Not the shoulder injury that forced her to take labour-intensive, wok-fried dishes off the menu; or the pandemic that saw her packing takeaway orders in an empty shop; not the pivot from bricks-and-mortar store to food truck. No matter what fortune threw at her, Sharon met it with a smile and a fresh idea. 

Then one day, after she’d retired from the food truck game, we met for a drink. She told me she’d been sick. “How sick?” I wondered. “The doctors are happy that the medicine is working,” she replied, smiling and insisting she pay for my glass of wine. 

I left the pub that night happy I’d caught up with my friend. We made plans to have lunch in the coming weeks, but in its mundane and insistent manner, life kept getting in the way. Then she went home to Malaysia for a visit. “It’s just a few months”, I thought to myself. I’d see her soon. 

There’s a tipping point in life when it really hits home how finite time is. It’s when you start to have last times, without realising it in the moment. The last time you trip over your partner’s shoes at the front door before your break-up. The last time your child is small enough to be carried. The last time you hug your dad. The last time you let a friend buy you a glass of wine at the pub thinking, “I’ll shout next time”.  

Sharon passed away in Malaysia on February 12. In her final days, she was cared for by her closest family and friends. She had such a larger-than-life spirit that it’s hard to imagine she’s not here anymore.  

During that first interview, Sharon explained Malaysia’s multicultural heart and how that translated to the food. “You can hardly find a single restaurant that specialises in one type of cuisine. Indian, Chinese, Nyonya, Malay food is all together. It’s unified,” she said. “It is Malaysian to bring together the food we love.”

And it was very Sharon to bring together people through her love of food. Vale, my friend.