![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranAfter celebrating the Chinese New Year last weekend in the traditional Chinese fashion (with a huge dinner with friends and relatives), this weekend we celebrated in the traditional Australian fashion, with a trip out for yum cha.
We went to Chequers in Chatswood, one of my favourite dim sum venues, and also an interesting marker of a number of trends. For starters, most of the clientele were non-Asian, which I've been noticing happening more and more over the last few years. There are still dim sum places around where the majority of customers are Asian, but they're getting harder and harder to find. Yum cha is definitely becoming more of a mainstream experience now, like the ubiquitous "Chinese" restaurant in every town was twenty years ago.
The other interesting trend is that more and more of the staff don't speak Cantonese. This actually caught us out a few times yesterday, especially when trying to order specific dishes. Another sign of the changing of the guard. You can already find non-Cantonese dian xin in various places around Sydney, and there's a growing number of mainland and Taiwanese dumpling restaurants around. I wonder how long it will be before it's a surprise to find Cantonese speakers pushing yum cha trolleys around.
We went to Chequers in Chatswood, one of my favourite dim sum venues, and also an interesting marker of a number of trends. For starters, most of the clientele were non-Asian, which I've been noticing happening more and more over the last few years. There are still dim sum places around where the majority of customers are Asian, but they're getting harder and harder to find. Yum cha is definitely becoming more of a mainstream experience now, like the ubiquitous "Chinese" restaurant in every town was twenty years ago.
The other interesting trend is that more and more of the staff don't speak Cantonese. This actually caught us out a few times yesterday, especially when trying to order specific dishes. Another sign of the changing of the guard. You can already find non-Cantonese dian xin in various places around Sydney, and there's a growing number of mainland and Taiwanese dumpling restaurants around. I wonder how long it will be before it's a surprise to find Cantonese speakers pushing yum cha trolleys around.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 05:50 am (UTC)In the 1980s, I went to a newly-opened Caribbean restaurant (Harry Singh's). The menu included chop suey -- a sort-of-Chinese dish invented in the US.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-01 06:26 am (UTC)And it used to be something of a running joke over here that the only time you ever saw a sign saying "Australian food" was at a Chinese restaurant.