After decades running some of the most famous restaurants in Australia, Kylie Kwong called it quits. What’s next?
After ending her 24-year restaurateur career, Kylie Kwong has brought her sharp-eyed, borderline-obsessive discipline to her new role as an associate of the Powerhouse Museum’s food program. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins/The GuardianIt’s Tuesday morning at Sun Ming BBQ House in Parramatta, in Sydney’s west, and the dining room is already full of Asian elders brunching on the restaurant’s famous siu mei .
“For the last 30 years, I have been a boss and an employer and the decision maker every day … And then during service, calling the pass, boom, boom, boom, boom.After Kwong packs the meal’s leftovers into containers, Sun Ming’s restaurant manager insists the meal is on the house; it is hard to do “I’ll pay the bill” battle with a stubborn Chinese auntie in hospitality mode.
Recently she was at a restaurant industry event and was talking to a well-known Sydney chef-owner who was grappling with the rollercoaster of sporadic patronage, rising costs and a head chef who had resigned after just four weeks. “And I thought to myself, do you know what? I don’t miss that,” says Kwong. “But at the same time … I’ve had so many more positives than negatives in my life as a chef and a restaurateur.
She hopes the industry is more sustainable for future generations. Lucky Kwong was only open for weekday lunch, to the chagrin of some. But after 19 years of dinner service at Billy Kwong it was one way to restore some equilibrium to her life. Restaurant-running is a notoriously difficult vocation – which is mostly fine when you’re younger, she says, but for chefs who’ve gone the distance, the antisocial hours and minimal financial return take their toll.
Namila Benson: ‘A big part of our culture is denialism. We just don’t know how to have difficult conversations’, leaving advertising to become a chef at 24, opening Billy Kwong. And listening to René Redzepi at the Sydney Opera House in 2010, where the Noma chef questioned why there were so few Australian native ingredients on local menus.
We leave Saravanaa Bhavan – with more takeaway in tow – and Kwong makes a wrong turn which takes us past the Powerhouse construction site, a beast of scaffolding and concrete whose clangs of hammer and steel echo down Phillip Street – it’s slated to open in 2025. After Kwong finds her bearings, we pass the dilapidated facade of the former Roxy theatre, dwarfed by cranes that are building the Parramatta metro station next door.
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