Ho Jiak

How often do you get to eat authentic Malaysian food? If you live in Sydney, Australia, you can find it at Ho Jiak, one of four restaurants by Chef Junda Khoo.

You can’t believe how good the food is in Sydney (I guess unless you live there and take it for granted).

Malaysian Roast Pork Belly

The quality of food is hard to beat since everything is usually sourced in the country.

And there’s tremendous variety because Sydney has become wildly diversified in the past decade or so. There’s been a lot of migration because, for crying out loud, there are only about 28 million people in the whole country, which is the size of the United States.

Many chefs have brought their own unique flavors from their countries.

There’s plenty of room for more, and there’s plenty of opportunity because the economy is strong.

What’s been happening is that a lot of chefs from Asia have come to Sydney and brought their own unique flavors from their countries.

Some of these are home-trained chefs who grew up in their parents’ modest restaurant in Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, you name it.

We often visit Sydney for six weeks in their summer, which is winter in the Northern Hemisphere (a good place to escape the cold), and always lament not having enough time to try all the restaurants on our list, much less go back to our favorites.

I can tell you about a bunch of standouts, but I’ll keep this short and give you the scoop on a modest restaurant that was a real surprise.

Ho Jiak is the personal playground of Chef Junda Khoo, who’s from Malaysia.

Laksa Bomb

Ho Jiak, in Town Hall, which is in the city’s central business district, is described as his playground. In other words, he puts his own spin on Malaysian cuisine like laksa bomb, bone marrow roti, roti pizza, Chinese doughnuts, and Vegemite short rib (huh?).

Gourmet Traveler lists Ho Jiak as one of the 80 best restaurants in Australia.

It’s also worth a trip downtown to Haymarket for his homage to homestyle cooking, taught by his family’s amah. An amah is a woman hired by a Malaysian family to look after the children. I found his cookbook, which is beautifully produced, but not having an amah at home, I’m a bit intimidated.