This enormous steamed seafood platter is one of Sydney’s most incredible dishes

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Hurstville has one of Sydney’s largest Chinese communities, but in reality, that description falls a little short. Shoot down Forest Road and the food tells a bigger story. Cumin-spiced lamb from Shanxi. Sticky fried rice from Hong Kong. Steamed Cantonese zongzi. Sticky Taiwanese snacks.

Pick just one aspect, like poultry, and the scope is wider than almost anywhere in the city. The street’s barbecue shops are strung with lacquered roasted ducks, soy chickens, pear-shaped pei pa ducks or fragrant Nanjing salted duck set to be thwacked into pieces. Then there’s the goose at Taste of Shunde, cleaved and shipped out on a scallop-edged porcelain platter. The crinkled skin is burnished gold with a fatty sheen, the sauce – coaxed out of the cooking juices – is rich, spiced and guttural.

If it was a goose-off, the birds at nearby yum cha institution Golden Sands would win out for their supple flesh, the lingering sweetness in the meat. But at Taste of Shunde, the goose is just the beginning.

Under harsh recessed lights and over intricately patterned carpet, waiters ferry out colourful bowls of precision-cut yam, asparagus and black fungus stir-fried to an elusive point between crunch and tenderness. Plates embellished with songbirds and blossoms are topped with green chillies stuffed with minced freshwater dace, fried until crisp and giving and sweet.

Exponents of Chinese cooking make it a mission to expand the knowledge of the cuisine outside and inside the eight great traditions or regional styles. Peel apart Cantonese, for one, and there are entire subcategories influenced by seasonal growing patterns, a fork in the river. This is the zone where Shunde cooking lives.

A district of Foshan nestled in the heart of the Pearl River Delta, Shunde has a food culture bound tightly to its agricultural traditions, as well as the classic Canto principle of enhancing each ingredient’s natural qualities – so much so that it’s often called the cradle of Cantonese cuisine. Fish, rice, buffalo milk, chicken, goose and flowers are staples, with the strength of its cuisine and skill of its chefs contributing to UNESCO designating Shunde as a City of Gastronomy in 2014.

But many people know Shunde, if they know it at all, as Bruce Lee’s ancestral home. Sam Luo, Taste of Shunde’s owner, kung fu master and chairman of the Bruce Lee World Dragon Fans Club Australia, knows plenty about Bruce Lee (there’s a photo of Luo posing in front of the bronze statue of the martial artist in Kogarah) but since opening Taste of Shunde in Kogarah, then moving it to Hurstville in 2021, Luo has also become an expert in extolling the culinary virtues of his hometown.

Goose and stuffed chillies abound, but given Shunde’s fish obsession, the seafood is the first place to look. Order the fish cakes, and behind their muted colouring, they pack gentle bounce and impressive lightness. There’s crab, lobster and Shunde-style coral trout sashimi to chase with a claypot of the braised head and bones, but if you’re not ordering an enormous steamed bamboo platter of fish and seafood, then you’re absolutely missing one of Sydney’s most incredible dishes.

A whole Murray cod or coral trout is the centrepiece, the fillets sliced and intricately arranged along each side, one half spread with green peppercorns, the other chilli, the remaining flesh coated in black bean and olive and reassembled down the centre. The slips of fish are silk-like, rows of pipis and prawns bring more colour and texture, while underneath lurk sheets of chencun noodles to drag up through the juices. Skip the platter and Taste of Shunde is a good time; order it and it’s an epic lifelong memory.

Less flashy, but still special is the wine-marinated chicken steamed to tenderness in a bamboo stalk, or stir-fried milk, coaxed slowly into a pure-white, quivering mountain over flames and topped with roe. Iced bitter melon spread with fried taro and peanuts is a refreshing counterpoint.

Oranges and biscuits are complimentary, but the double-skin milk is a specialty worth giving a whirl, as is the yum cha. Taste of Shunde isn’t static, either. There’s another in Eastwood, and here the downstairs dining room, which was looking tired, has been flipped into a grocer. Upstairs has more polish and atmosphere as a result, even if there’s a children’s playground in one corner.

But maybe that’s part of the appeal. This is a restaurant for homesick locals, families, or anyone who loves Shunde cooking or thinks they might. Sydney’s recent restaurant news cycle has been dominated by flash inner-city Chinese restaurants, mostly riffing on well-known Cantonese classics: “Is Chinese back?” Taste of Shunde, and Hurstville, is here to remind them that Sydney offers so much more. As Bruce Lee might say, empty your cup so that it may be filled.

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