Ho Jiak

You can’t believe how good the food is in Sydney (I guess unless you live there and take it for granted). The quality of food is hard to beat since everything is usually sourced in the country. And there’s tremendous variety because Sydney has become wildly diversified in the past decade or so. There’s been a lot of migration because, for crying out loud, there are only about 25 million people in the whole country which is the size of the United States. I mean there’s plenty of room for more and there’s plenty of opportunity because the economy is strong.

So, what’s been happening is a lot of chefs from Asia have come to Sydney and brought their own unique flavors of their countries. I swear some of these are home-trained chefs, who grew up in their parent's modest restaurant in Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, you name it.

We often visit Sydney for six weeks in their summer which is winter in the Northern Hemisphere (a good place to escape the cold) and always lament not having enough time to try all the restaurants on our list, much less go back to our favorites.

I can tell you about a bunch of standouts, but I’ll keep this short and give you the scoop on a modest restaurant that was a real surprise.

Ho Jiak is the personal playground of Chef Junda Khoo who’s from Malaysian. He’s got four restaurants in Sydney including one in Chinatown that we loved as well.

His restaurant in Town Hall which is in the city’s central business district is described as his playground. In other words, he puts his own spin on Malaysian cuisine like laksa bomb, bone marrow roti, roti pizza, Chinese doughnuts, and Vegemite short rib (huh?).

It’s also worth a trip downtown to Haymarket for his homage to homestyle cooking, taught by his family’s amah, a woman hired by a Malaysian family to look after the children.

I found his cookbook which is beautifully produced but, not having an amah at home, I’m a bit intimidated.