T-CHOW AND THE SATURDAY TABLE

CHEF SO HON HUANG, BOB SKURRAY, PETER COX, DORA TAK SUM CHAN, THE AUTHOR, MRS SO (OBSCURED) GI GI TAK SUM CHAN, ANNE SKURRAY, PAUL JAMES (OBSCURED) AND MIN COX - T-CHOW SATURDAY TABLE ORIGINALS WITH THE KEY STAFF

One Table, Two Decades Of Perfect Lunch
A Legendary Restaurant Changes Hands
Ten Thousand Bottles Of Wine Later
by PHILIP WHITE
photographs by MILTON WORDLEY

Sometime about 1990, when I lived in the inner City of Adelaide, I discovered a new restaurant in the Central Market/Chinatown precinct. It was tiny, seating forty or fifty souls, on the corner of Gouger and Market Streets. Its staff were newly-arrived Chinese; its cuisine Chui-chow; its name the appropriately Ockerised T-Chow.

Language was a problem, but it would have been much worse had it not been for Dora, who worked kitchen with assistant Chef Singlet No. 1 and, occasionally, Chef Singlet No. 2. Dora had been a teacher of English in Hong Kong, and soon taught me that this cuisine came from a small part of Canton where not a lot of overt herbs, spices or flavourings were used.

Dora’s daughter Gi Gi, a speaker of perfect English and student of concert piano at the Elder Conservatorium, was a waiter.

Each Saturday morning, I would select a couple of bottles of good wine, walk from my flat to the Central Market, buy my next week’s food, and the day’s newspapers, and settle down in T-Chow to read, drink, graze, smoke, and take notes on the better wines.

A Singha first, with pickled cabbage. Fish skin next: only from the snook, which was used to make the fish balls. Fish balls, I learned, needed to bounce, and the best bouncing flesh came from highly oxygenated fish flesh, from fast fish which lived in fizzy water. Like the snook. The skin was peeled from the fish, and flash deep-fried in a light rice wine batter. It was utterly scrumptious, and its oils helped stave off winter colds.

I ate T-Chow duck, carefully cooked to drain off most of its fat, bones in. Seafood hot pot, with stingray, mussels, prawns, great lumps of bean curd and shiitake. Whole flounder, baked or steamed. Scallops roast on their half-shells with shallots and mandarin peel. Chiuk-sung with Chinese broccoli, shiitake and ginger. (Chiuk sung is like a tiny loofah: the skeletal remains of a sun-dried, cucumber-like gourd which lives as a parasite on the trunks of baby giant bamboo. Rehydrated and cooked, it’s rich in glycerol and fibre, with an inimitable al dente crunch amongst its lovely slime.) Twin pepper pork: capsicum slices with black pepper and ribs cooked and served in a hot pot. Pig stomach soup: pork tripe, cleaned in milk, and souped with mustard seed and black pepper. Ground pork with string beans and Chinese olives. Omelettes: radish or oyster. Perfectly understated food: you’d never leave feeling overstuffed or uncomfortable: click T-Chow on Google, and you’ll get reams of reviews. I’d rub my belly, say “Thankyou. Thankyou. Happy stomach!”, bow to my hosts, and depart.

Once we gathered the pluck to ask for a little bowl of hot chilli in oil on the side, Chef So became very concerned that we thought his food lacked spice. With Dora’s translation, we explained that no, the food was exquisite. But those of us who’d eaten similar cuisine in Hong Kong or China knew that a little chilli was admissable; that quickly became the norm, and everybody was very happy.

T-Chow’s gentle cuisine became renown for its healing capacities, especially on the stomach tenderised by overly enthusiastic imbibition on the previous eve.

As more City trenchermen discovered T-Chow, the Saturday lunch gradually became a ritual, and at different tables, different little groups gradually made it a regular observance. The restaurant air would fill with the smell of everybody’s baskets of fresh vegetables from the market, and mingle, tantalising, with the smell of roasting duck.

Gradually, we got to know each other. It began with the swapping of glasses and bottles, from one table to another, the recommendation of different dishes to newcomers, and, eventually, the sharing of tables.

A critical moment came the day when a bloke I called Buddha - never to his face, but in my notes and my private mind - rolled in with an imperial of Irvine Merlot. An imperial is six litres – eight bottles worth. Buddha earned this private name for his enormous bulk – 6’4” x 24 stone in the old money - and the satisfaction that glowed from him as he ate and drank, and, when he’d finished, the pacific silent humming omm that he radiated as he remembered what he’d eaten. I commented on the notable fact that a diner should arrive to a quiet solo lunch with an imperial.

“Thinking man’s stubby”, he said, offering me a glass.

For international readers, a stubby is a small bottle of beer.

This turned out to be Big Bob Skurray, of Travel International. Skurray knew the numbers of every flight to almost everywhere on Earth, provided there was a great restaurant or winery at the other end. If, for example, somebody wanted to attend the Russian Tea Room in New York to celebrate a birthday, he would rattle off the best flight for that date, explain the best route from the airport to the most appropriate hotel close to the Tea Room, explain how long the traveller would have to shower and change, give the customer a card with the restaurant’s telephone number, advise how far ahead a booking should be made, and everything would be fixed. Over the Saturday Table.

In the early ’nineties, few Australian winemakers had done much international travel. There had been no call for it. Few had even bothered to visit the great vignobles of France whose wines they were, to all intents and purposes, copying. The Australian wine export boom was then but a dream. But the wine industry quickly realised that Skurray was the man to be organising all those tentative, exploratory journeys into the wine markets of Britain and the United States, or tours of discovery in Bordeaux, Champagne and Burgundy. He looked after his charges.

SAYING A HEARTFELT THANKYOU TO A BELOVED RESTAURANT CREW WHO CHANGED THE WAY MANY AUSTRALIANS EAT

By the late ’nineties, for example, a young Californian wine merchant, Dan Phillips, would trust Bob to advise him of which flight to catch in LA so he could alight thirty hours later in Adelaide, and catch a cab straight to the Saturday Table.

In 1993, I was pushing my way through the throng at Vinexpo in Bordeaux, and “BOO!” ... Skurray the giant leapt from behind a hedge of potted kentias, scaring the bejeezuz out of me. We swapped yarns of favourite tinctures we'd tasted in that great hall, and then discussed what we’d be eating at T-Chow when we got home. What we'd drink with it. It felt like we’d just met in the Adelaide Central Market: perfectly natural.

A few days later, Monica and I had caught a dangerously late TGV from Bordeaux to Paris, to make a non-transferable international flight home. The train was short when we embarked, and made only two or three stops en route to Paris. I’d scoured my maps of the complex Parisienne railway system, and knew that it would be touch and go, changing varieties of train twice more from the TGV to Charles de Gaulle and getting to the plane on time. When we disembarked, we were shocked to discover the TGV had grown to what seemed to be a kilometre in length. It had picked up many more carriages in those few stops, and now we were at its tail end, with mountains of baggage and wine, and a very long run to make the connector into town. We ran. Halfway along that interminable platform, we came upon a huge shape, punching a trolley vending machine. It was Skurray, trying to get his money back. We didn’t stop. “See you at the Table Saturday”, he yelled, as we scurried by. “T-Chow duck, bones in”. Which we did.

T-Chow became so popular the owners soon rented a much bigger space around the corner, in Moonta Street in the middle of Chinatown. There was misplaced panic as myopic cynics alleged the bigger the restaurant, the worse the food would become. But no. The bigger joint had a bigger kitchen, and the quality, whilst varying a little depending upon the composition of the kitchen crew, remained very high.

Because there was much more room, the tables were bigger, and the Saturday crew from the old premises began to share a round table. It started at eight seats. Big Bob was a founding member. With due deference to the Formula One Grand Prix which took place in the City streets each year, he’d say the grace: “Gentlemen, start your stomachs”, and off we’d go. Occasionally his fiancée of fifteen years, Anne, would join. Peter and Min Cox, also in the travel business. Steve Tracey, wine merchant. Paul James, aka Petshop, because he owned petshops.

We began to invite guests, and over the years, people of every walk of life attended that table. Musicians, winemakers, wine merchants, warriors, photographers, writers, sportsmen, hookers, jewellers, priests, designers, artists, comedians, film-makers, lawyers, pharmacists, private detectives, alleged murderers, depressives, policemen, inventors, chefs, poets, doctors, drug dealers, restaurateurs, nurses, shrinks, builders, publicans, gutter rats, enforcers, martial artists, their trainers, schoolteachers, real estate people, egotistical bastards, newsreaders, politicians, reporters, schizophrenics ... you name ’em, that table’s had ’em.

CHEF SO, THE AUTHOR, AND CHEONG LIEW, DRINKING DELICIOUS TOURIGA NACIONAL FROM OLD MILL ESTATE, OWNED BY PETER WIDDOP, THE GUY BEHIND CHEONG, HIS WIFE VICKY,AND THEIR FOUR DAUGHTERS.

It didn’t take long to discover that Big Bob Skurray was a revered black belt Tai Kwon Do man who had a deft hand at massage and back manipulation that he'd learned in that martial training, so it became a regular fixture that he would throw me around like a rag doll after lunch and then put my buggered back into alignment.

“Now, you might get a bit of deep tissue bruising here”, he’d mutter in my ear, reaching his mighty fingers into one of my lumbar vertebrae, to grasp it and move it back to its proper spot. Then half the staff would crawl over his giant frame, attempting to get their fingers into him.

Bacchus knows, Skurray’s saved me $50,000 of physiotherapy and massage fees in those two decades. He’s literally kept me on my feet.

Nearly a decade back, Leo Davis, a self-confessed statistically-obsessed pedant, and amateur taxonomist, began to attend. Before long, he was keeping a spreadsheet, detailing who attended, who introduced them, which wines they brought, and so forth and so on. He’d photograph every gathering, and keep an amazing record, including the label from every wine bottle consumed; even detailing the nature of the conversations, which were often rather heated.

In his nine years, Leo's spreadsheets show that 523 different people have sat at that table, with a total of 5185 chairs filled. You could add, say 70% of that again and you'd have the gist of how many souls have enjoyed gastronomic fellowship there. Around 1997-99, it ballooned for a while to thirty to forty people per lunch, but eventually settled at a more workable twelve to fourteen. Sometimes it’s a pensive, but delicious six or seven, and we can all partake of every bottle. There are no bookings: you get there after noon, and take a chair. Once the table’s full, you start another. To keep it simple, one trusted regular always orders for the whole throng.

We have watched regular, beloved diners gradually grow ill and die during the life of that table; others were there, fit and healthy one week, only to drop dead before the next. So we grieve. We are good grievers. Divorces and marriages have ebbed and flowed; lovers have come and gone; babies have been born. It has been a whole village; a railway station; and it has most certainly been a Vinexpo: around ten thousand wines, including many priceless treasures, have been savoured and shared, remembered and written about.

Chef So was always dependable for something extra special when Cheong Liew and I organised a Duck Walk.

But the other day – you knew this was coming, didn’t you – the other day, dear Dora, and her longtime partner in the business, the formidable Chef So, did their last shift. They cooked us some perfectly drunken chicken and a juicy farewell pig, closed the kitchen, and retired. Just like that.

It was one of those days. The table filled quickly, so we started another. That filled, too. So we built a bridge to connect the two. Round tables are notoriously difficult to adjoin.

Jack Hibberd, the great playwright and poet, flew in from Melbourne to read us a special poem he’d written to mark the occasion. I made a speech about how that restaurant, those beloved people, had changed our lives. We presented Chef So and Mrs So, and Dora, with framed copies of Leo’s spreadsheets from the last twelve months – the ten year job would have been ten metres long.

We dined once again like royalty, and left. Chef So and Dora locked the door, and went away. There are new owners now, of a different gastronomic persuasion from a different part of China, and I have not yet attended under their regime. I may be brave enough tomorrow.

Many, many waiters and chefs learned their dots in that kitchen, on that floor. Two rival restaurants, Ying-Chow and Ky-Chow were started around the corner by people who got their break in the T-Chow kitchen, and these now have their own pilgrims.

Now that I’ve written this, I know that the story will grow and transform as more memories and sentiments float to the top, and different souls tug my sleeve and say “Whitey, you shoulda ... ”

In which case, Whitey shall. The Saturday Table’s like that.

BIG BOB BUDDHA SKURRAY CONTEMPLATES TWO DECADES OF SATURDAY LUNCHES, NOT TO MENTION SOME 10,000 BOTTLES OF WINE. STOP PRESS MILTON, WHO MADE THIS PHOTOGRAPH, AND BACCHUS BLESS HIM FOR THAT, SAYS WEE RAB WAS ACTUALLY ASLEEP.