My mother, in all the decades we’ve dined out, has never liked a single restaurant I’ve taken her – even though I’ve written about food for nearly 20 years. Then we went to Yan, an Asian smokehouse in Sydney. Instead of dropping typical complaints about price (too expensive) or the cooking quality (inferior), she gave something rare and unexpected: hard-won Asian-parent praise. For this alone, I consider it an award-winning restaurant.
In Australia, dining guides and restaurant awards have become more culturally diverse over time, after criticism in recent years that Euro-style, fine-dining establishments with designer fit-outs, postcard views and internationally recognised chefs receive the highest accolades, while non-western cuisines are relegated to the “cheap eats” sections.
But one group of diners is tougher on restaurants than professional reviewers: migrant elders.
Owner Narada Kudinar is proud his restaurant has been well-reviewed by major Australian food publications, but winning over sceptical migrant diners is a special achievement.
When younger diners bring parents (or older “aunties” and “uncles”) to Yan, he notices how elders view the restaurant with suspicion: there’s no thick, picture-filled menu typical of Asian eateries, Yan (Mandarin for “smoke”) chars dishes in non-traditional ways, the kitchen is open and doesn’t use woks. “Sometimes we don’t even have Asian people in the kitchen,” Kudinar says.
But it’s the food that wins them over. “Because I’m Chinese, I don’t want to bastardise anything beyond recognition … The flavours we stick to are true to our culture,” says Kudinar. Yan’s mushroom “noodle soup”, for example, might look like a lasagne but it contains familiar flavours like mushroom broth, handmade noodles, mustard leaf, black vinegar and chilli.
Requests for hot water (an Asian cure-all and dining must) are also accommodated without judgment.
Kudinar recognises why older Asian migrant-background diners are harsh critics. “I think it’s got to do with spending your hard-earned money … [and feeling] like you could’ve done better yourself. That’s a really difficult thing to overcome.”
So when non-believers become happy fans before the table’s cleared, “it’s a double hit of that great feeling of hospitality that you get,” he says. “We’ve had parents out-visit our restaurant compared to their kids over time.”
Like Kudinar, chef Neville Dsouza has felt honoured when established food critics sized up his skills. But the ultimate verdict on his cooking came in 2022 at Irene’s, his pop-up restaurant inspired by his Mumbai upbringing, where he served a goat curry to an Indian grandmother.
“She’s going to tell us if the curry is good or not,” he remembers saying to his sous chef. She was the “real” restaurant critic: she’d cooked more curries than he’d ever had. At the meal’s end, the chef nervously asked for her verdict. “This is probably one of the best curries I’ve had in Australia,” she said. Dsouza couldn’t believe he had her approval. “I think we won,” he thought.
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Irene’s was named after his late aunt, and the winning goat curry had come from her hand-written, decades-old recipe that Dsouza managed to track down after her death.
Dsouza has jostled the pans at European-leaning restaurants such as Saint Peter and Cirrus, but says cooking the food from his culture – and family – has a special meaning. “It’s very different than cooking a piece of fish with carrot puree and putting nasturtiums on there, because that’s a job,” says Dsouza. That goat curry, with its green mango hint, could power him back to childhood Sundays in his aunty’s Mumbai apartment. “When you cook something like that, it’s more.”
That “more” hasn’t always been recognised by dining guides and restaurant awards. “You’re never going to be restaurant of the year if you’re someone’s favourite place that they visit on a weekly basis,” says Nancy Lee, who wrote her PhD on celebrity chef culture. “Those kinds of awards are targeted at those special-occasion places.”
Food publications have long celebrated “white tablecloth type” establishments with big-name chefs, but Lee says the culinary knowledge of migrants can get overlooked, or be seen as a given: “Surely he can make a pad Thai because he’s Thai”. But being a Chinese dumpling master, for instance, requires incredible skills. “I make pasta at home,” she says. “I could never do xiao long bao.”
For Ashley Vola, who runs Melbourne restaurant Vola Foods, it’s important to stay true to her food culture.
“Everybody just thought African food was Ethiopian and that was it.” Her plan to highlight West African cuisine was met with enthusiasm when she launched in 2021: 300 people turned up, and were willing to wait two hours for food, she says.
Vola has gradually shifted to focusing on the food of her birthplace, Cameroon, but it’s been challenging.
“Customers will call up and be like, ‘Is this a Nigerian or Ghanaian restaurant?’” she says. “I’ll be like, ‘It’s Cameroonian.’ And they hang up.”
But she credits tough diners in the community, including her sister Kelly (“one of the most pickiest eaters I know”), for helping fine-tune her food – and develop a backbone for criticism. “I also worked in childcare,” she says. “Kids are the hardest people to please.”
Recently she took a call from an older Nigerian man who wanted to leave a review for a meal he’d had a month ago. His tone was aggressive: the kind your boss uses when you’re about to be fired. She braced for the worst. Because he was using words in his language to name the dishes, she had trouble understanding him. “[I said] ‘I’m so sorry uncle. I literally have no idea what that means’ … Then he went, ‘Your food is fantastic!’ Oh my god! I literally just fell down.”
Because of this feedback from her community, she says, “I’m constantly reminded, every day, why I should stay open.”