The Innovators: Jacquie Chan makes Asian food sexy
She has hundreds of staff, six venues – nine by the end of the year – a supermarket dumplings business, a mega production kitchen making dumplings for supermarkets around the nation and one of the highest staff retention rates in hospitality.
But according to hospo entrepreneur and owner of the Miss Chow brand, Jacquie Chan: “hospitality is just my side hustle.”
Jacquie Chan specialises in fusion on steriods. Innovative, yet sensible.Credit: Rob Broadfield
“My day job is a pearl and diamond trader,” she says.
One wonders how much time she spends on diamonds and pearls. She seems to be constantly in her restaurant businesses, meeting chefs and floor crews, chasing down new ideas and new menus. She is a restless over-achiever and in the parlance of Seinfeld, a fast talker.
Her Miss Chows dumplings restaurants (Claremont, South Perth) and Miss Chow’s Pantries (City Beach, Bicton) are unlike traditional Chinese dumpling and dim sum restaurants. Cutting edge décor, unconventional flavours and a focus on modern cocktails is her brand, especially at her two newest restaurants, Kiri in Shenton Park and the neon-meets-Blade Runner, mod-Asian Lucy Luu in Mount Hawthorn.
Chan “fell into the food business by accident in 2015” when a client, who owned a string of sushi bars in Melbourne, expressed an interest in the diamond and pearl business.
“It’s been quite a journey. It’s a different game, a tough gig,” Chan says.
“Eight years ago WA’s food scene was a bit backward. The food and hospitality scene has grown so much in recent years. It’s exceptional. WA is in a good place at the moment with an offering as good as any other city in the world.”
She has come a long way since she stumbled into one of the country’s most notoriously difficult business sectors.
Chan would not divulge her businesses’ earnings (we asked, she laughed) but she told WAtoday that her success comes, partly, “because we made Asian sexy.”
She has a point. If there was ever a cookie cutter style for Australian Chinese and Asian restaurants, it’s that of a busy, brusque, no décor, zero personality eating house with hundreds of items on a typically plastic-coated menu with pictures. Fast food with crockery.
Her restaurants by comparison are modern with references to pop culture, street food, short menus and exceptional interior design.
Banging prawn toasts at Lucy Luu.
Lucy Luu is a case in point. It looks like a smart inner urban gallery with neon installations, movies projected on to large wall spaces, impeccably hip colours, a minimalist scattering of objet d’art and typology that borrows more from Korea than China.
You could film a K-Pop video at Lucy Luu and not need to change the interiors. Its social media posture is a jaunty collection of reels and Instagram posts with dynamic backing tracks and smart videography.
“I can’t eat in most Asian restaurants because of my food allergies, so at our restaurants the produce is msg free, nut free and free of artificial colourings and preservatives.” Chan says.
Her kitchens use only free-range meats and line caught fish. She keeps the food as “clean” as possible.
The focus on cocktails is because of her love of a good drink, which we can attest to after our interview for this story over dinner. Let’s just say Chan knows how to give the liquor a good nudge.
Chan is clearly not afraid of the word fusion.
While she’s Chinese, she is Malaysian Chinese which she thinks has given her a capacity to be less hidebound by traditional Chinese restaurant constraints.
Lucy Luu’s menu has sriracha (Thailand) tiger prawns on brioche (France) with saffron aioli and togarashi (Japan), Ji Pai chicken (Taiwan) with yuzu (Japan), a very Aussie Amelia Park Lamb dumpling with green chilli dressing and a lush truffle fried rice.
Fusion is a dirty word with many chefs, but her new venture, slated to open in October on Bayview Terrace in Claremont is an emphatic, possibly weird, embrace of fusion on steroids.
It will be an Italian Asian bar and restaurant called Lygon Lane, a nod to Melbourne’s Lygon Street, ground zero for Italian restaurants and mobsters.
“I’ve always been pushing the boundaries with my food, but it only works if you give people good quality food and execute it well. We think it will be a good marriage,” Chan says.
“We’ll have a big bar component at Lygon Lane with a great wine list and cocktails.”
Another venue in Perth city will also open later this year, a Japanese-inspired burger bar.
Think Katsu pork burgers and a beef burger with top notch house ground patties. If the enduring popularity of the world’s most zeitgeisty sandwich, the katsu sando is anything to go by, then a Japanese-inspired burger bar is innovative, but hardly a stretch.
And what of her latest opening, Kiri in Shenton Park? We arrived with our sceptimeter on high alert. Japanese flavours, especially the cutting and presentation of sashimi grade fish confounds Japanese chefs who’ve been in the business decades.
Kiri’s tuna sashimi was one of the finest, freshest slices of raw fish we’ve eaten.
What next? An Inuit German breakfast bar selling whale meat sausages? There are a few more restaurants in the pipeline. Chan is on track to open another three venues in 2024 and her early concepts for this next tranche of hospitality ventures are at once as boundary pushing and as sensible as anything she has done before.
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