Honey chicken, fried ice cream: Chinese restaurants in small-town Australia might not always serve ‘authentic’ food, but new TV show celebrates them
- Chopsticks or Fork? visits some of Australia’s most remote Chinese kitchens, each with a different background that influences their menus and flavours
- While untraditional, many of the dishes are likely to evoke a strong sense of nostalgia in viewers who grew up away from the big cities
There’s a so-called Chinese restaurant in most small towns in Australia, but few of them serve the kind of food a gourmet would expect to see on the menu.
These restaurants are rarely celebrated and the origin of their staple dishes is often questionable. Fare such as honey chicken, lemongrass pork and fried ice cream won’t catch the attention of inner-city foodies looking for authentic Chinese food, but for other diners the menu items can be a trip down memory lane – to a childhood birthday, a first date, wedding receptions, funerals and sometimes even Christmas.
A new television series set to air on Australia’s government-funded ABC network in mid-2021 celebrates the nation’s small-town Chinese restaurants, with producers also negotiating a run on ABC Australia, the international network that broadcasts across Asia.
Chopsticks or Fork? is a six-episode series that goes beyond the wok and straight to the people behind some of Australia’s most remote Chinese kitchens. Each show takes place in a different restaurant in one of six towns across four states and territories.
The first stop, New Bo Wa Restaurant in Moree – a town with a population of about 7,000 on the black-soil plains 500km (310 miles) northwest of Sydney – took one of the two Chinese-Australian journalists behind the show straight back to her childhood.