Perth’s best restaurants and fine dim sum

Like most migrants, the Veenhuyzen family’s early years in Australia had its challenges.

Having relocated from tropical Indonesia, none of us were used to the cold so we spent our first Australian winter catching and re-catching the flu. My parents had it even worse and had to contend with frequent – and not to mention expensive – bouts of homesickness on top of the coughing, the wheezing and their two young sons that needed feeding. (The cost of a long-distance phone call in the mid-80s was no joke.)

And let’s not forget the joys of getting your head and tongue around a new language. Or at least a new language and collection of slang that exists outside of a dictionary. We learned the hard way that when people ask you to bring a plate to a party, they usually expect you to put some food on that plate too.

Which leads me to one of the major themes in my family’s move from Medan to Mandurah: not being able to eat the Chinese and Indonesian cooking that was everywhere in the Sumatran capital. The noodles. The furious sambals buzzing with chilli. The cakes, biscuits and sweets lumped under the catch-all of kuih.

In a small regional centre circa 1985, these foodstuffs as well as the ingredients to make them were non-existent. The only way to get your Asian food fix was to make the (then) two-hour drive to Perth. Or more specifically, Northbridge: a wonderland of Asian grocers, shops and eateries.

More often than not, lunch on these excursions was at Golden Galleon: Kim Ng’s legendary Francis Street dining room where families would squeeze around tables to hook into dim sum, the Chinese brunch time all-in involving steamer baskets of dumplings, plates of fried things, pots of tea and good-natured banter between pushy trolley aunties and guests.

Four decades on and dim sum in Northbridge remains a popular brunchtime outing, not least on weekends where crowds gather on the footpath outside establishments such as Northbridge Chinese Restaurant (Liu Fook), Fortune Five and Moon Flower (nee Dragon Palace) to catch up and potentially begin morning-after recoveries from the night-before.

Considering the prominent role that Northbridge plays in WA’s Chinese migrant story, it’s unsurprising that the area remains our ground zero for dim sum. What is surprising, however, is the growing number of dim sum options one can find outside of the city centre.

The Emperors Kitchens. The Wang’s Treasure Houses. The Pimms Palaces: just some of the establishments bringing dumplings and fried squid and impatient queuers to the ’burbs.

For my money, the best of these is Canton Lane: a bustling Cantonese restaurant with a contemporarily styled dining room beautified with autumnal hues and shimmering gold accents. While there’s an element of Chinese palatial to the design, the finished product feels more Ang Lee than Shaw Brothers.

Canton Lane’s modern aesthetic is just one way that it distances itself from the crowd.

Another is its location at Belmont Forum Shopping Centre. On face value it seems like an unusual choice but according to chef-owner Alvin Ooi, opening a dim sum joint in a suburban shopping centre has a lot of pluses for guests. There’s plenty of parking and being able to do some shopping while waiting for your number to be called – and anyone that gets here after 10am on weekends should almost always expect to queue – makes a lot of sense for an increasingly time-poor society.

But perhaps the biggest detail that denotes Canton Lane as a dim sum address of note is the quality of Ooi’s cooking.

Although Ooi was born near Ipoh in East Malaysia, it was in Auckland that he learned how to make dim sum by working under demanding chefs (predominantly from Hong Kong) at various Cantonese restaurants. He then spent seven years fine-tuning his bread and pastry skills at Classic Bake House, a Taiwanese bakery that grew from a single venue to a chain during Ooi’s tenure there. After returning to the dim sum game, he was offered a role in Melbourne before being lured west to run the kitchen at the aforementioned Wang’s Treasure House: his first dim sum head chef role.

But it was at Northbridge’s Canton Bay (formerly Regal on Roe and the former sister restaurant to Canton Lane) that he started to turn heads for his exacting, uncompromising dim sum.

Broadly speaking, there are two main metrics one can use to measure the skill of dim sum chefs. One is how close they get to the textbook definitions of the classics; and the second is the daring and deliciousness of their original creations. Our man gets top marks in both categories.

Take the prawn dumplings known as har gow and considered one of the essential dim sum items. While the star of the show has all the sweetness and juiciness one expects from well-handled seafood, it’s the dough – supple, gently tacky and rolled out to the right thickness to create that all-important crystalline translucence – that suggests this is a kitchen that sweats the little things.

Canton Lane’s char siu bao (pillowy buns filled with roast pork in a sweet gravy; the final resting place for pigs that have lived a good life) are airy and fleet-footed thanks to a three-day process that involves, among other things, a naturally fermented, sourdough-ish mother that bubbles away in plastic tubs in the kitchen. (The initial mother was brought to Perth from Melbourne by Ooi.)

Egg custard tarts (known as dan daat in Cantonese and popularised in Hong Kong after local dim sum chefs synthesised the Portuguese pastel de nata and English custard tarts) are another dim sum cornerstone and come in two main styles. Tarts with a biscuitty, tart-like base; or tarts made with a buttery shell that’s made by making a water dough and a lard dough, then combining and folding together the two in alternating layers to create a mille-feuille-ish puff pastry.

I prefer mine that are prepared in the latter style, especially if they’re fresh out of the oven and the shimmering, still-warm egg custard is barely set and almost too much for the pastry to handle.

The poetically named phoenix claws (twice-cooked chicken’s feet that’s deep-fried and then steamed) feature meaty, good-sized feet. Do you like tripe? Book tripe (tripe that comes from the cow’s third stomach) that’s been cut into thick, mop-like pieces gets steamed with white pepper plus (and here’s the genius move) sand ginger powder: a secret ingredient that Ooi says eliminates that beefy pong one sometimes finds with lesser tripe dishes.

If beef stomach is a bridge too far, perhaps you might consider the steamed pepper beef ribs. While not a dish that Ooi created, it shows off his cooking nous so sits somewhere between classic and new-school. While you can find tasty steamed beef (and pork) ribs on dim sum menus around town, I don’t think I’ve encountered any as meaty as these. Our man gets in whole, bone-in ribs and cuts them across the grain into thick, bone-in pieces to ensure maximum fattiness, beefiness and flavour. Mark this as one to look for.

Ooi’s biggest flex and contribution to the great-dishes-of-Perth discussion, however, is his durian mochi: a swoon-inducing dessert that he created during his Canton Bay days. (The dish’s genesis? Business at the restaurant after the renovation was slow and he needed to get customers to the restaurant, stat.) Whereas the word mochi calls to mind Japan’s famous glutinous rice cakes, the mochi’s silken, blemish-free skin is made with a fragile dough some might recognise from the fancy snow skin mooncakes that emerged in the 60s
as an alternative to the traditional baked Cantonese mooncakes. If Snow White was a real person, her cheeks would probably look like these.

Dim sum, for those that haven’t been, isn’t a quiet meal. Tables are loud. People jostle for favourite items on the table. Staff work the room with an urgency. It’s also not a leisurely meal, at least here on weekends. In the interests of fairness to guests, tables will only be seated once everyone is there and you’ve only got an hour to eat. It’s one of the few lowlights to a meal here, ditto the understated chilli oil and the low-grade jasmine that serves as the house tea.

But in the grand scheme of things, these pointers are minor missteps and easily forgotten in the afterglow of cooking this accomplished, plus the pleasures that come with sharing food and conversation with pals. (And you should definitely come with friends: dim sum eaten as a solo diner is a tough ask, not least due to the FOMO that comes with having to order from a daytime menu of some 100 items.)