He quit law for the family restaurant. Can he change how you think about Chinese food?

It’s one of Ecca Zhang’s first memories. A blurry image of two tall pillars in an airport, tears, and a feeling of panic. At two-years-old, he was boarding his first international flight to Beijing, alone.

Until that moment, much of Zhang’s small life was spent at Grape Garden, his family’s Chinese restaurant, then located in Marrickville. Zhang’s father, Lun Gao, worked through his birth, and his mother, Jie Zhang, “was pretty much on her feet, I think, a day or two after”.

Zhang says he was brought into the restaurant as an infant and watched over, intermittently, as his mother ran the kitchen. It worked well enough, until his younger sister was born.

“They couldn’t juggle [the restaurant and] the two of us, so I was sent to China for three or four months to live with my grandmother.” He laughs, uncomfortable. “I remember the trauma more than anything else.”

When Grape Garden first opened in 1989, it became the sun at the centre of the Zhang family. More than 30 years on, its gravitational pull remains just as fierce. When Lun Gao and Jie Zhang attempted to “ride off into the sunset to enjoy retirement” in 2020, it lasted just two years. When they returned to reopen Grape Garden on Bayswater Road in Kings Cross in 2022, Zhang sacrificed his career in competition law to join them.

The 33-year-old has since become the public face of Grape Garden, and in October, received The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide Oceania Cruises Service Excellence Award.

And his parents? They just returned from a holiday, visiting tea farms in Guangzhou. Together, the family launched their first retail product this week, a chilli oil, using a recipe Jie Zhang has been perfecting for decades.

“I’ve kind of just gotten stuck here,” Zhang says. “It’s become a war of attrition between the three of us. Whoever says they quit first, loses.” This time, the laugh comes easily. “None of us will say it. I’m holding on, they’re holding on … I think we enjoy it too much.”

Hospitality wasn’t anyone’s first choice for Zhang (“I joked around with Mum and Dad about it before finishing school, and they were all, ‘absolutely not!’,” he says), but he has a remarkable affinity for service. He is charming, he can cook (pork and fennel dumplings are his specialty, available to order off-menu) and he speaks three languages (English, Mandarin, Japanese). He’s also retained enough lawyerly neuroses (his words) to micromanage (also his words) the flow of a restaurant.

In theory, Zhang can relax today. We’re having lunch at Clarence and V – a favourite among hospitality professionals for the old-school hospitality of owner Vito Mollica and the unfussy, flavour-forward dishes of chef Stella Roditis. Zhang is a regular: “I feel like there’s a little bit more TLC behind it,” he says.

But switching off from service isn’t so easy. Zhang is worried about his restaurant choice: is it interesting enough, would I enjoy the food? We have a brief back and forth about who should order. He “wants to see the food reviewer at their best”. I remind him that this interview isn’t about me. He gets the house bread, yellow split pea dip, prawn gratine, roast beef salad and the porchetta, thinly sliced with purple cabbage slaw, to share. For now, he’s sticking with the water, but later, he’ll order a classic negroni.

When the porchetta arrives, Zhang carefully serves a couple of slices onto my plate. He has a familial approach to service, both here and at Grape Garden.

“I don’t really look at it as service. It’s how I treat my friends when I go out to eat,” he says. “If I go to a Korean barbecue or anything which requires a little bit of cooking, I cook. We eat. It’s quick. We’re in, we’re out, and we enjoy ourselves. Nobody has a shitty time.

“At the restaurant, [my service style] started off like that, and then I just realised that some people just need a little bit more of a helping hand. For example, with noodles, they’re a little bit slippery, especially in the soups, so I just help divvy it up. Makes it easier.”

Sure, but that’s more care than one might expect from a BYO restaurant with mains priced around $25. And Zhang keeps talking, revealing there’s more to it.

“Good service is about understanding what people want,” he begins. “Simple questions. I always start off with dietaries. What can we eat, what can’t we eat? Do we like something, or do we hate something? Is coriander a problem? Sweet. Understood.

“Are we vegan or are we vegetarian? In the eastern suburbs I have to be very careful because are we vegetarians for show, or are we vegetarians for real? Is chicken soup okay? ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, so long as I don’t eat the meat that’s fine.’ So, we’re vegetarian lax, technically.”

He takes a breath. The waitress sets down the prawn gratine, a plate with a single cooked, butterflied prawn dusted with herbs, breadcrumbs and spices.

“The second question, which I ask now, just to cover my arse … do you want value, or do you want prime? Are you on a nice date where you want to try a few little things, but you don’t want it to be too heavy? Or are we celebrating, going balls to the wall?”

He goes on, but you get the idea. Zhang considers every minute detail of every customer’s visit, from the moment they make a booking. He hasn’t thought too hard about where that initiative comes from, but supposes it has something to do with the reason he’s working at Grape Garden in the first place: to help his parents carry on a culinary legacy.

“It’s almost 40 years of work. It would be a shame to let it go,” Zhang says.

Grape Garden isn’t just a Chinese restaurant, after all. It is a Northern Chinese restaurant, serving a specific type of “homely” cuisine from Beijing: hand-pulled ropes of fat, chewy noodles in peppery red dan-dan soup, san xian dumplings bathed in chilli oil, and light celery salad with thin-sliced yuba (bean curd skin).

Those dishes were hard to find in Sydney when Grape Garden first opened. Times have changed, but Zhang says a “cultural sort of lexical gap” remains. There are ingredients, flavours, and culinary concepts that aren’t easily translated into English.

“I think one of those come-to-God moments was when I was watching No Reservations [the travel show with late author-chef Anthony Bourdain], and I saw him explore different countries, different areas, different foods, and they’d … all have their own story behind them. I was trying to figure out why, when it came to Chinese food, the story was never there.”

Bourdain might not have had the words to explain why food from Beijing differs from food from Guangzhou or Chongxing, but Zhang does. He wants to use that knowledge to uplift the profile of Chinese cuisine. It isn’t “sexy” in Sydney, he says, but with restaurants opening like Grandfathers and Young’s Palace, it could be.

“I’d like to be someone who’s able to explain that, somebody who’s researched, who’s able to enlighten others about the difference in cultural food,” he says. “There are so many parts in China, and there are so many different types of food, with so many flavour profiles.”

“I’m able to speak English and Mandarin. I understand both concepts. It’s my job to explain it, which is why I work the way I do at the restaurant.”

He is the third culture kid: reverent of his parents, the business they grew, and the food they cooked. He’s excited about the growing popularity of Chinese food in Sydney, and uniquely placed to bridge the gap. Maybe he will return to law, someday. But for now, there are no regrets.

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