Kowloon BBQ Restaurant

302 Victoria Avenue CHATSWOOD 2067
Phone 94112988

Review originally posted on the 4th of March 2003

A sign on Victoria Avenue Chatswood tells me the Kowloon BBQ Restaurant, situated directly opposite the Chatswood BBQ Kitchen has, so to speak, hung out its shingle.

What’s in a name? More than is in a sign, apparently.

The signage supplier to Chinese BBQ restaurants wearily maintains integrity to that archaic western perception of all things Chinese ie they all look the same.

Such an invariable format makes it impossible to distinguish one, in terms of potential quality, from another. That’s assuming the westerner is brave enough to enter at all. A national dread for eating anything but spring rolls and dim sims has become a heritage of our unwitting prejudice. Although, it’s keeping an important division of the chemical companies going - the fast-food industry…

The Kowloon kitchen's fixtures and fittings show refinement. Five cozy booths hug the right-hand wall, and a center-aisle runway has the narrowness of a cricket-pitch. A cleaver-wielding cook removes carcass parts from some vertically suspended hooks on one’s left, and further down, towards the batsman’s end, more tables are positioned outside a kitchen door.

Here the cooking not the cook possesses primacy. 223 dishes on the menu demonstrate cuisine as craft by fine-tuning through repetition. This isn’t art, because cooking isn’t art. 16 menu sections run through various ingredients prepared traditionally. Braised pigs’ ears, tongue, stomach or intestine, it’s your choice, become less daunting surrounded by golden stock, ginger and lotus root. The swine’s knuckle, served with jellyfish, balances richness with slippery crunch. For the less adventurous salt baking of chicken revitalizes the bird revealing fat slabs of white meat. Or braised scallops with noodles are lush and buttery tasting. The subtle nuance of this large menu avoids clichés, but more importantly, nothing I ate tasted like the refrigerator.

One waiter, in traditional white sox, a food runner, and the owner crack jokes in Cantonese while gently and purposefully serving students or grandmothers. Various other assistants wander from, and then back to the kitchen. Meanwhile Chinese Consulate officials - I love the company of spies at lunchtime - nab the best booths. In a similarly set up western place, like the beanery that keeps dropping those naff flyers into my letterbox, a short-skirted bimbo, or a Stavros type asking the “beyoodifool laydees” is, “everything all right?” would generate half the business and cost twice as much. Kowloon BBQ Restaurant is defiantly busy. It’s attuned to an area of Sydney once known as the Kowloon side of the harbour. And all this occurs without a chef’s name on the sign. Appearing, as it no doubt would, in the possessive case.