You could come to Nihao Kitchen every week for a year and still not plough your way through the menu.
Chinese$$
Here comes the waiter again, replacing our dirty plates with clean ones, tidying up half-eaten dishes in the middle of our table and rearranging them onto smaller platters, refilling cups with jasmine tea and generally exercising a highly attuned hospitality sixth sense for anticipating, as yet unformed needs.
As busy as Nihao Kitchen is, there’s a clear feeling that everything is in hand. A laden lazy susan spins at the centre of a family gathering and a kid looks up from an iPad to eat a spring roll. A waiter wheels a trolley tableside, ferrying the restaurant’s signature “Pi-Pa” duck, roasted, gleaming and spreadeagled to resemble a pear-shaped “pipa” lute (a traditional Chinese instrument). Twelve people file in the back door from the rear car park and walk straight upstairs to one of the new private rooms. A group of men in the front corner window share a bottle of baijiu, a distilled grain spirit, and their celebration lobster keels over as it’s devoured.
Up the hill from Kew Junction, these premises have been Nihao Kitchen since 2018. Owner Jan Ho is from Hong Kong and has a 25-year career in hospitality, including at much-loved venues Dainty Sichuan, Kum Den and Lau’s Family Kitchen. His co-owner and wife, Cleo Wang, is from Qingdao and ran NiHao Dumpling in Ivanhoe for seven years. At Nihao (Mandarin for “hello”), they’ve coalesced their restaurant experience and cultural backgrounds to encompass both southern and northern Chinese cuisines.
You could come here every week for a year and still not plough your way through the menu, a 30-page document with photos so attractive they actually make it harder to choose. The waiters offer wise counsel, though, and it’s impossible to go wrong. Ho keeps a keen eye on everything parading out of the kitchen: if it’s not perfect, it’s not hitting a table.
Spiced shredded chicken is a towering salad of poultry on the bone, the fat sitting sweet and cool under the skin. Tossed with raw red onion, celery, coriander, sesame seeds and chilli, it’s a lively pleasure to eat.
Winter melon – a large, fleshy gourd – is peeled, steamed and upturned to form a curved lid for wok-tossed chicken, duck, prawn and scallop. The winter melon is carved at the table to reveal the tender, juicy “cangzhen” (hidden treasure) underneath.
Egg tofu (with soy milk and egg yolk) is made in-house and deep-fried, creamy-soft and delicate for tossing with mushrooms in oyster gravy.
Pipis are stir-fried with smoky, chewy, house-made XO sauce: order them with Chinese doughnuts for crunchy dipping.
Egg floss is a Chinese-Malaysian preparation made by mixing butter and yolks and agitating them in a hot wok to form fluffy, melty strands; it’s served here with prawns.
Eggplant wedges are fried hot and hard to a molten, sticky, dark-soy-tinged jumble. Cubed beef is velvety and surprisingly tender, tossed with blistered green beans and garlic.
The photos on the menu are so attractive they actually make it harder to choose.
At the end, a platter of fresh fruit is complimentary, but I’m hoping you’ll order the custard buns as well. Smooth and glossy-white, the steamed dough pulls apart to reveal a lava-flow of eggy yellow custard, an irresistible balance of sweet and bright, springy and gooey.
There’s so, so much more, but what strikes me is the quality across all dishes, whether they’re simple or complex, humble or heroic. Nihao Kitchen is an excellent restaurant: always striving, never quite satisfied, continually doing something new and bringing joy with every meal along the way.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Joyful and unflappable
Go-to dishes: Spiced shredded chicken ($39); white Cangzhen ($51); pipis in XO sauce ($32; add a Chinese doughnut for $4)
Drinks: The Chinese tea selection is good and your pot of pu’er will be endlessly refreshed. You’re also sorted if you want to share a bottle of whisky, cognac or baijiu. There’s a small, thoughtful wine list but BYO is welcome and costs only $3.50 per person.
Cost: About $150 for two, excluding drinks
This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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