You can take your pick this weekend as to whether you celebrate all things Australian or all things Chinese – or neither, you old grouch. I'm having a bet each way by celebrating the Aussie-Chinese food of my childhood, and my future.
I learnt a lot at the lazy-susanned tables of the Mee Ging, Fairy Stork and the Tientsin on Acland Street, in Melbourne's seaside suburb of St Kilda. The chefs at these restaurants were developing a legitimate regional cuisine that had its spiritual roots in the make-do cooking of early Chinese immigrants on the goldfields, at outback stations, and in country pubs. (Fun fact: by 1890, one-third of all cooks in Australia were Chinese.)
Chinese chefs and restaurateurs have long worked hard, and often ingeniously, to temper their ancient cuisines in a way that appeals to a new, non-Chinese customer. Brilliant case in point: William Chen Wing Young, of Melbourne's Wing Lee restaurant, inventing the dim sim (not dim sum, the collective term) in 1945.
More steamed meatball than delicate siu mai, it nevertheless helped to get a whole generation of suspicious diners across the line. So did the lemon chicken, black bean beef, fluorescent-red sweet and sour pork and cornflour thickened chicken chow mein of the traditional Friday night Chinese takeaway.
These days we like to get all snobbish about those dishes as we dine at Mr Wong, Spice Temple and Billy Kwong – but wait. There's now a new style of Aussie Chinese, brought to you by a new style of Aussie-Chinese chef.
Quirky brother-and-sister Sydney pop-up Good Luck Pinbone has moved straight into old-school Chinese territory with their stir-fried chrysanthemum greens over macadamia milk custard, smoked eel on soy and linseed toast, and boiled peanuts ("because they're awesome").
Victor Liong of Melbourne's Lee Ho Fook makes his own scampi crackers and adds blue swimmer crab and scallop to his fried rice. Aussie-Chinese food is even back in pubs. Melbourne has Andrew McConnell's Ricky & Pinky at the Builders Arms, where the ma po beancurd evokes the old Mandarin restaurant in Toorak Road in the 1980s.
Sydney has Merivale's new Queen Chow in Enmore, where pippies and black beans are steamed in Young Henry's lager, and dessert is poetically named "the forgotten koi fish in the frozen pond". It's the law of the lazy susan – everything that goes around comes around – eventually.