Honey chicken? Not tonight. Meet the new restaurants changing Chinese food

The vanguard of hospitality talent is redefining contemporary Chinese cuisine with the opening of three restaurants in Sydney, but don’t expect to see sizzling beef and lemon chicken added to the endangered list just yet.

Highly anticipated newcomers Grandfathers in Martin Place and Young’s Palace at Potts Point, as well as an upcoming Sydney outpost from two-hatted Melbourne restaurant Lee Ho Fook, take Chinese food in exciting new directions, merging tradition with the cuisines and influences of Australia’s multicultural landscape.

The results are exciting: Cantonese sauces layered with native spices, prawn toast served on artisanal sourdough bread and young spanner crab whipped into egg foo young.

“I think China has the most diverse and historic cuisine in the world,” said chef and Grandfathers’ co-owner Michael Clift, before opening the doors to his moody 140-seater restaurant last week.

“We consider it to be the mother of all cuisines.”

For Clift and business partners Dan Pepperell and Andrew Tyson, Grandfathers is the latest of five restaurants to tackle a different cuisine. It follows their Roman Italian restaurant Pellegrino 2000 (Surry Hills), northern Italian restaurant Neptune’s Grotto, the New York-style grill Clam Bar (Circular Quay) and the now-closed French restaurant Bistrot 916 (Elizabeth Bay).

This one is named for Clift’s Chinese grandfather, whose love of food inspired the chef’s career. There’s a wide cast of characters on the opening menu, including the husband and wife salad, which combines veal tongue and crispy tripe, and king prawn with almond on sourdough toast. Honey chicken, it is not.

Meanwhile, at the pioneering Wolli Creek restaurant Yan, owner Narada Kudinar has long been determined to move beyond the conventions of the suburban Chinese restaurants he once frequented with his Chinese grandparents, growing up in Sydney’s Hills district.

“I wanted Yan to be a representation of Sydney,” he says.

Kudinar borrows from American barbecuing techniques, while layering Cantonese flavours to build sauces the way a European chef might. Since opening in 2017, Kudinar has even toyed with native Australian produce, integrating eucalyptus and finger lime.

“You’ve got to take your inspiration wherever you [can] get [it],” he says. Yan’s signature dish is a mesquite-wood smoked beef short-rib with fresh lime and ginger sauce, layered over just-sauteed kale.

Celebrated chef-restaurateur Victor Liong says the menu at Lee Ho Fook is a “creative filter” for his travel experiences, and an opportunity to showcase sustainable Australian produce through a Chinese lens.

Liong grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and worked at Marque, the now-closed French fine diner in Surry Hills, before returning to the cuisine of his childhood with a fresh perspective.

He opened Lee Ho Fook in Melbourne in 2013, impressing critics with his application of European cooking techniques to Chinese dishes. The restaurant currently holds two Good Food Guide hats.

Innovation is set to continue when Lee Ho Fook opens on Castlereagh Street, Sydney, on September 17. The menu will feature the restaurant’s standout dish, four dances of the sea, which serves four types of seafood in four different ways; as well as prawn toast, substituting prawn for sea urchin.

At Potts Point, chef and co-owner “Big” Sam Young describes new restaurant Young’s Palace as “a love letter to the immigrant experience”.

Unlike the other chefs in this new batch of launches, Young and partner Grace Chen grew up in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, respectively.

“There’s no orange chicken in Hong Kong,” Young says. But there was in Canada, where he first tried westernised Chinese cuisine as a teenager attending boarding school.

And there was in Amsterdam, where Chen discovered oversized loempia (Indonesian-style spring rolls) while on holiday: “To be honest, we didn’t really eat spring rolls in restaurants [growing up in the south of China], unless it was yum cha,” she says.

Those memories have shaped the opening menu at Young’s Palace, where diners will find familiar dishes such as chicken and sweetcorn soup (made from fresh corn, not canned), sticky honey king prawns and kung pao chicken.

Young’s Palace is also a reflection of how far the two chefs have come since moving to Australia. Young says he didn’t get off to a great start – his money was stolen, and he was rarely able to eat out. But, after meeting Chen in a Merivale kitchen, the pair opened their first restaurant together in 2022, S’more, at Castlecrag.

Young says S’more’s menu, stacked with luxury ingredients including caviar and lobster, is a reflection of his mindset at that time: “I used to think if you can order lobster, you’re made it,” he says.

“[Whereas] Young’s is about the food we crave when we travel.”