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The Streets With Dan Hong
series • cooking
PG
series • cooking
PG
When Lingqi Yang prepared for the first time, she was only a kid, so she struggled with the cooking equipment required for the Cantonese rice noodle rolls. "I'm not strong enough to hold a steamer tray," she recalls. The process took five times longer than it does today at her restaurants in Sydney.
At the original Zetland location, she believes she's the quickest at completing the silky rolls: from pouring the rice batter onto the steamer to pulling the thin sheets out after the heat transforms them. Yang is now exceptionally skilled at this, in fact, she once made 400 serves of cheung fun in one day.
Her first Taste of Canton restaurant, which sits , opened last March. It was inspired by cravings for the Cantonese staple she grew up with in .
"I'd eat cheung fun every day for breakfast before I'd go to school," she recalls. There were so many vendors that offered it. While the sauce-drizzled rolls might appear on yum cha tables in Sydney, which is where she relocated in 2015, it's rare to find any eateries that specialise in the dish here.
"I wanted to just introduce the authentic flavour of cheung fun to people from all around the world," she says. And Yang does exactly that at Taste of Canton, where the menu is highly personal.
The traditional Cantonese soy sauce you spoon over the rolls actually originated from her aunt, who's operated a restaurant in Foshan, in China's Guangdong province, for two decades. There's also the mushroom and garlic sauce you can also drizzle over your order. It's a Shenzhen-style condiment, which reflects where her partner is from. "He usually eats cheung fun in that sauce and I usually do cheung fun in the soy sauce. We were arguing about the sauce, and then we just finally decided just to serve two sauces." (They're both great.)
She experimented with her batter and it took her 40 attempts before nailing her recipe. You can try the resulting cheung fun at her Zetland restaurant in various iterations (plain with prawn, barbecue pork and minced beef, or with additional egg, lettuce, and sweetcorn, for example) as well as other Chinese dishes she felt nostalgic for, like black bean spare ribs and barbecue pork bun.
This menu instantly connected with people who also share her roots. Soon after opening, customers from Guangdong province were stunned that a Sydney restaurant was offering variations on cheung fun. Within days, posts about Taste of Canton were all over . Her staff weren't quite ready for the surge of diners this brought, but it trained them well for the following months when the restaurant got increasing attention from local influencers and media outlets.
But despite all the buzz and coverage, people still struggle to find Taste of Canton, because of its unlikely location.
"I have missed a lot of calls [from people confused by the address]: 'I am in a random carwash, I can't find a restaurant'," she says.
However, the low-key setting near a busy road makes sense for the menu.
"Cheung fun is a street food," the restaurateur says. It's also a snack that doesn't require a spacious or fancy dining room.
"People have cheung fun in a really, really short time, like 10 minutes or 15 minutes. And they don't really just sit down and have dinner for like, two, three hours," Yang adds.
But the Zetland store's popularity has meant a second outlet was inevitable. The restaurateur recently opened another Taste of Canton, this time in inner-city Ultimo.
"So many people came to the Zetland one. And their [time] waiting [was] one hour and longer," she says. Customers complained that they weren't prepared to queue that long for cheung fun. With a second restaurant, "we will just shorten the waiting time to like 15 or 20 minutes".
And there's interest in a third venue, too. In fact, one acquaintance has already made a request. "If you want to open a third one, could you please ask me to ask me first?" Taste of Canton fans might want to lodge similar wishes.
